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Lloyd D. Partridge
December 18, 1922 - April 5, 2005
Dr. Lloyd D. Partridge died on 5 April 2005 after a
brief illness. Dr. Partridge was born in Cortland, NY in 1922 and earned a
BS in Chemistry, and MS and PhD in physiology from the University of
Michigan. He was an assistant professor of physiology at Yale University
School of Medicine and held associate and full professorships in the
Department of Physiology at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine.
He was also a visiting professor at the University of Vermont, University of
Western Ontario, Medical College of Ohio, University of California Los
Angeles, and he was an adjunct professor in the Department of Biomedical
Engineering at the University of Memphis.
He was a member of the American Physiological Society
for more than 50 years and attended all of the APS annual meetings during
those years. He was also a member of the Society for Neuroscience, American
Academy of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering Society, and the IEEE. He
served these societies in various capacities including section editor for
the Annals of Biomedical Engineering and associate editor for the
Proceedings of the IEEE.
Dr. Partridge’s research career was dedicated to
understanding mechanisms of motor control. From his initial work on the
stretch reflex and cerebellar function, he went on to be one of the first to
bring control systems analyses to understanding the control of muscle
function. His chapter “Muscle, the Motor” in the Handbook of Physiology
(1981) was a bold attempt to explore the ways in which the geometric and
functional complexity of muscles represents a solution to problems that are
inadequately handled by the computational algorithms of the nervous system.
In addition to his contributions to the understanding of motor systems, his
scientific interests spanned a broad range from sensory transduction and
filtering, to measurement and analysis of scientific communication and
literature, to the history of physiological instrumentation.
He will be especially missed by the generations of
medical and graduate students who benefited from his insightful and
challenging teaching style. He never felt that learning stopped at the end
of a lecture or laboratory exercise, but that it continued in hallways,
coffee shops, or mountain tops with no limitations on the scope of the
acceptable input information.
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