M. ALLEN POND, P.E.
Assistant Surgeon General
Rear Admiral, USPHS (ret.)
Martin Allen Pond, born in Ansonia, Connecticut on October 17, 1912, was known to his friends and colleagues as “Allen.” His career included twenty-four years of service as an engineer officer in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) as well as many years on the public health faculties at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering in 1935 from Yale University and a Master of Public Health degree, also from Yale University, in 1936. He was a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of Connecticut. Prior to joining the Public Health Service, he served on the public health faculty at Yale from 1936 through 1941 as an Instructor and then Assistant Professor of Public Health.
Pond joined the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service shortly after the U.S. entry into World War II, in January of 1942, and was posted to the Procurement and Assignment Service of the War Manpower Commission. In 1943 he was assigned as an engineering and environmental health consultant to the Federal Public Housing Authority. There he began a life-long professional interest in the subject of the hygiene of housing. Pond left the PHS in September 1946 to rejoin the faculty of public health at Yale University. During that time he organized the first program offered in an American university on the hygiene of housing.
Pond was married to the former Madeline Davidson. They had three children, Jonathan, Roger and Sarah.
Pond returned to active duty in the USPHS in June of 1948 to serve as Assistant Chief Sanitary Engineering Officer. From 1949 to 1951 he served as Chief of the Division of Engineering Resources. In 1951 he was assigned as coordinator of community facility activities, serving through 1953, at which point he was named as Staff Assistant to the Special Assistant for Health and Medial Affairs to the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW).
Pond continued to serve the rest of his active duty career in the Office of the Secretary (HEW) where he contributed to the development of Federal health care policies including Medicare and Medicaid as well as other national health planning legislation.
In June of 1958, Pond was promoted to Assistant Surgeon General with the equivalent rank of Rear Admiral (lower half) in the PHS Commissioned Corps. He was promoted to RADM (upper half) in January 1963. On October 1, 1968, he retired from the PHS with a total of 24 years in the service.
During his PHS career RADM Pond served for several years as chairman of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Urban Health Affairs and was a departmental representative on the Federal Council for Science and Technology. He organized, and was a member of, the U. S. delegation for technical discussions at two World Health Assemblies
After his retirement from the Commissioned Corps, RADM Pond returned to academia at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburg, where he served as a Professor of Health Policy and Management. As a faculty member he organized and taught the first regularly scheduled graduate seminar on the “Politics of Health” offered in an American university. From 1969 to 1978, in addition to his professorial duties, he held the post of Associate Dean, and from 1979 to 1980 was the Dean of the School. He retired from the University in1980 and he and his wife moved to Cranberry Township in Pennsylvania. The M. Allen Pond Chair in Health Policy & Management was created in his honor at the University of Pittsburgh.
RADM Pond was a life member of the Commissioned Officers Association of the USPHS, and a life member of the American Public Health Association (APHA), having served on its Governing Council and as chair of its engineering section and its committee on the hygiene of housing. From 1968 to 1975 he served as the Chairman of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Public Health. He also served for three years as a member of the National Health Council.
Pond is the recipient of the World War II Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal, and National Defense Service Medal. In 1978 he received the Sedgwick Memorial Medal from the APHA for “Distinguished service and the advancement of public health knowledge and practice.”
RADM (ret.) Pond passed away at his home on January 4, 1995.
July 2007
Back to History of USPHS Engineers
