Remembering Tad Powell

Retired LMP pathologist Ralph Dewey Powell, Jr, known all his life as Tad, died August 18 at his home.

Tad was born in Newton, MA on June 4, 1932 to Eugenia Norris Powell and Ralph Dewey Powell, the youngest of three children. Tad attended public schools in Weston and graduated from Noble and Greenough school. He attended Amherst College where he played football, switched from engineering to pre-med and graduated in 1954. He then entered Boston University School of Medicine, graduating in 1958, and interned at the Mass Memorial Hospital in Boston before entering residency training in pathology at Case Western Reserve. After residency, in 1965, Tad joined the US Public Health Service and went to the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, joining the Laboratory of Pathology under the leadership of Dr. Harold Stewart. He left NIH in 1972 to move with his family to Lexington, KY, to join the Department of Pathology at the University of KY and become the director of pathology services at the Lexington VA medical center. After many wonderful years in KY, Tad and his wife LMP professor Deborah Power moved to Kansas City, KS where he was a Professor of Pathology at the University of KS School of Medicine, doing surgical pathology. The Powell family moved in 2002 to the University of Minnesota Medical School where Tad worked as an anatomic pathologist in LMP until his retirement in 2014.

Donations to the Alzheimer’s Foundation or to the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center would be appreciated.

Information above drawn from Tad Powell's obituary published in the StarTribune.