Donna Russell Fox ’48

Donna Russell Fox ’48 is retired, but not really. Fox, who taught at the University of Houston for 30 years, is retired from teaching, but still works with cleft palate patients at a clinic in Houston, where she lives. One day a month she sees patients and one day a month she helps a radiologist examine X-rays to determine the best course of treatment. And once a year, she’s part of a team that goes to Central and South America to treat patients with cleft palate.

About 20 people go, she said, and she’s involved both pre and post-surgery, helping to determine treatment and providing support for the patients as they recover. Fox has spent nearly her entire career working with the speech and psychological implications of cleft palate, and she said it’s been most satisfying because doctors can solve the problem.

“It’s something you can fix,” she said. “How many things in life can you actually fix?” When she’s not seeing patients, she’s travelling or breeding and training poodles—two of her dogs have been nationally recognized. In 2004 she endowed the Donna Fox Women in Science Lecture at Cornell, because when she entered the fields of psychology and speech pathology after graduating from the University of Washington, there weren’t many women in science.