No. 714 Randall J. Olson, 2013

File — Box: 71, Folder: 13

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Dr. Randall J Olson (b. 1947), CEO of the University of Utah’s Moran Eye Center, discusses his life and career in four interviews. The first two cover his childhood, education and early career; the last two, his time on the faculty of the University of Utah. He was born in Glendale, California, to a father from Utah and a mother from southern California. His father served in the Pacific Theater of World War II. A sickly child, he moved with his family to Salt Lake City when a teenager to follow his father’s appointment in the metallurgy department at the University of Utah. Dr. Olson graduated from Highland High School, where he me Pat Shea, though he likes to say he dropped out since he left high school a year early to attend the University of Utah. He served an LDS mission to Sweden, where he discovered running, and then went to medical school at the University of Utah. He met his wife in the 1960s and was married in 1970. Dr. Olson was in Sweden for a medical fellowship during the “Seven Crown Crisis,” and graduated in 1973. He moved on to ophthalmology at UCLA in 1974, and nearly forty years later is still thrilled with his decision to pursue that field. Dr. Olson spent time in Honduras on another fellowship, worked at LSU in New Orleans helping them set up a premium eye care facility, and then returned to the University of Utah in 1979, for which he credits Herb Kaufman. Made Chief of Cornea, he aggressively expanded his tiny division and has never stopped. Early programs involved outreach into neighboring states and his successful drive to make ophthalmology a department. He discusses numerous colleagues, remembering especially David Apple and Alan Crandall from his early years at the “U.” In the mid-1980s Dr. Olson spent some time in Saudi Arabia at the King Khalid Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and operated on the King’s stepmother. The late 1980s found the Department of Ophthalmology needing to expand, and Dr. Olson worked closely with philanthropist John A. Moran to create the Moran Eye Center, which first opened in 1993 and then in 2003 upgraded to a much larger facility. Dr. Olson discusses fundraising at great length, but also spends time discussing the role of Wayne Imbrescia, currently the ambulatory care director for the entire University of Utah health sciences operation, in making the Moran function. He discusses the process of funding and building the new Moran Eye Center and describes the Center’s research and international outreach programs in detail, but also shares memories of his son’s cancer and of his own experience with eye surgery.
Project: University of Utah Oral History.
Interviewer: Anne Peterson

Dates

2013

Conditions Governing Access

Twenty-four hour advanced notice encouraged. Materials must be used on-site. Access to parts of this collection may be restricted under provisions of state or federal law.