Jerry Vaughn

We would like to share with all of our members, the recipient of the prestigious “Volunteer of the Year” for 2014 - 2015 is: Jerry Vaughn.

This year at the RA Spring Volunteer Luncheon, we surprised our exemplary volunteer, Jerry Vaughn with the news that he was the recipient of the UCSD Retirement Association’s Volunteer of the Year Award. We would like to introduce Jerry to our members.

Jerry and his wife Alice are two mainstays in the center of the RA Gazette Groupies, the group of members who, every month come out to volunteer a few hours to assist us with Gazette post-production. But, in addition to his years of service to the RA in this area, Jerry stepped up and provided extraordinary service over the last year. We have wanted to put together a new tracking system for our Chancellor's Scholars Program, which is maturing nicely, with eight years of students moving through our mentoring and communications and leadership development programs. We wanted a unique CSP database which would keep all student data neatly sorted and allow us to better report on the programs successes. Jerry took on this challenge, and for a many months, analyzed, programmed, tested and debugged an entirely new system, tailored especially for the CSP. Jerry came in to fix and tweak the new system so frequently for a while, that it felt like he was part of the RRC staff! Our new system is all finished, quite an achievement for Jerry, and for the RRC.

"I grew up on a farm/ranch in Eastern Colorado where my father raised wheat, corn barley, cattle and hogs with a smidgen of other crops and critters. When people talk about how small their graduating class was I always laugh – K through 12 at my school was about 80 students.

After graduating from Northeastern Junior College with a degree in applied electronics, I enlisted in the Navy where I spent 10 years, mostly on fast attack submarines, as a reactor operator. While on shore duty I attended San Diego State University part time and, after leaving the Navy, returned there and graduated with a degree in computer science.

I started my career at UCSD while finishing my degree working at the Hillcrest hospital in the pulmonary division. If you have ever done the breath test where they tell you to blow! blow! blow! – I helped write one of the first computerized versions of that. After a year I moved to the Human Subjects Research Lab where the primary focus was on evaluating equipment for medical equipment companies such as ventilators, oximeters, and metabolic monitors in a patient environment. Programming, statistics, data management and engineering were useful skills for that task.

After about 5 years Dr. Dave Burns, the principal investigator I was working for, was selected to be the scientific editor for the Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health and my focus slowly changed to the health effects of tobacco. At 10 years, a new group was formed by Dave and we moved to the division of Family and Preentive Medicine with the entire focus on tobacco and health issues associated with its use.

My volunteer work also related to tobacco as I served as a member and chair of the San Diego Tobacco Control Coalition, as a member and chair of the San Diego Youth Task Force, as a volunteer for the American Lung Association and as a member of the San Diego Department of Health Services Tobacco Control Grant Review Committee.

During that time we were under contract with the state of California and the National Institutes of Health for state level and national level monographs relating to tobacco and health. The topics ranged from determining the most effective smoking cessation methods to how to prevent youth uptake as well modeling smoking related diseases to aid in forecasting health and financial benefits of cessation and reduced uptake.

In 2007 after 25 plus years, I decided I was not busy enough so I retired and started pursing other interests including photography, travel, volunteering my software skills to non-profits, just plain old learning, tinkering in electronics (which lead to me getting my HAM license) and enjoying the family.