Norris Receives WSU Alumni Achievement Award

PULLMAN, Wash. — Dr. H. Thomas Norris, professor emeritus at East Carolina University’s School of Medicine in Greenville, N.C., has received a Washington State University Alumni Achievement Award.

At a May 27 gathering of family and friends, including Alumni Association past presidents in Seattle, he was cited for a long and distinguished career as a practicing pathologist and as a professor in academic medicine.

Norris retired in 1997after 14 years on the ECU medical school faculty, where he was chair of the pathology and laboratory medicine department.

The Pullman High School graduate earned a degree in premedicine with honors in 1956 at WSU, where his father, Herbert, had been chairman of the music department. Norris was a member of Delta Chi Fraternity and shared his father’s interest in music by performing as an instrumentalist in campus-wide music programs.

He earned a degree in medicine at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. Following a year in a rotating general internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital, he spent his residency at the Mallory Institute of Pathology at Boston City Hospital. Later he was an associate pathologist with the department of experimental pathology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., for two years, before he was made a research fellow at Harvard Medical School.

After his initial teaching experience at Tufts University School of Medicine, he joined the pathology faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine, where he remained until 1983. During his time in Seattle, he was assistant chief of laboratory service at Veteran’s Administration Hospital (1967-74) and director of hospital pathology at University Hospital (1974-83).

As an Army captain, he spent two years in the U.S. Medical Corps. Between 1989 and 1996, he was an inspector for the Pathology Laboratory Accreditation Program. In that capacity, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and Japan, as well as other countries.

He is married to the former Patricia “Pat” Henry, a 1956 WSU graduate, from Colfax. The couple divides its time between homes in Greenville, N.C., and Hayden Lake, Idaho.