Robert Burns Aird (5 November 1903 – 28 January 2000) was an American educator,

neurologist Neurology (from el, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the brain, the spinal c ...

and

epileptologist An epileptologist is a neurologist who specializes in the treatment of epilepsy. Epileptologists are experts in epileptic seizures and seizure disorders, anticonvulsants, and special situations involving seizures, such as cases in which all treatme ...

. Aird's father, Dr. John Aird, founded Provo General Hospital in Provo, Utah, with two other doctors, Dr. Fred W. Taylor and George E. Robison, in 1903. The hospital was the first general hospital in Utah County. In 1923 the partnership broke up and Dr. John Aird continued the hospital under the name of the Aird Hospital from 1923 to 1939 when Utah Valley Hospital was opened. Robert Aird's grandfather and grandmother, William Aird and Elizabeth McLean, were Scottish immigrants and the family was proud of its heritage, thus the name "Robert Burns" Aird, after the famous Scottish poet. His uncle, Henry McLean Aird, was a prominent educator in Utah. After education at

Deep Springs College Deep Springs College (known simply as Deep Springs or DS) is a private, selective two-year college in Deep Springs, California. With the number of undergraduates restricted to 26, the college is one of the smallest institutions of higher educat ...

, Aird was awarded a Telluride undergraduate residential scholarship at Cornell University. Following postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School, Aird worked first as a neurosurgeon and then as a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). He was made the first chair when the Department of Neurology was created in 1949 and was professor and chair until his retirement in 1966. In addition to conducting his own research ( Flynn Aird syndrome bears his name), Aird developed the department into a leading academic center for the study of the brain sciences, drawing future Nobel laureate

Stanley Prusiner Stanley Benjamin Prusiner (born May 28, 1942) is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of ...

as a resident late during Aird's tenure. From 1958 to 1959 he served as president of the American Epilepsy Society (AES) and received its Lennox Award in 1970. Aird wrote a

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

of modern neurology and coauthored 2 textbooks on epilepsy.Aird RB, Masland RL, Woodbury DM. The Epilepsies. A Critical Review. New York, Raven Press 1984 A lifelong musician, Aird was president of the

Cornell University Glee Club The Cornell University Glee Club (CUGC) is the oldest student organization at Cornell University, having been organized shortly after the first students arrived on campus in 1868. The CUGC is a thirty-nine member chorus for tenor and bass voices ...

as an undergraduate, and during his tenure as neurology chairman at UCSF wrote a musical about the life of Joshua A. Norton (ca. 1815-1880), the mentally ill self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States and Mexico.

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