Conrad J. “Bud” Weiser (1935-) taught at Oregon State University for twenty years as a plant stress physiologist, horticulturalist, department head, and Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences.

While attending North Dakota State College, Weiser changed his major from chemistry to horticulture. He graduated in 1957 specializing in horticultural crop physiology and pathology. He earned his doctorate from Oregon State College in 1960. After his PhD, Weiser began his career at the University of Minnesota, where he established and led the Laboratory of Cold Hardiness. Even during his time at the University of Minnesota, Weiser remained in contact with faculty at OSU. In the spring of 1971, he completed a three-month sabbatical at OSU researching plant hardiness with Dr. Mal Westwood. Just before the start of school that year, Weiser and his family took a trip to visit extended family in western North Dakota. On the way home, they were involved in a car accident that killed his wife and daughter. This loss and OSU calling to see if he would be interested in returning, led to Weiser making the decision to leave Minnesota. In 1973, he accepted the position as head of the Horticulture Department at OSU. In 1987, he was honored as a distinguished professor. He assumed the position of Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences in 1991 until his retirement in 1993.

OSU’s Horticultural Department was recognized as one of the top five departments in the United States during the eighteen years Weiser was its head. He established a 70-member industry board to advise the department and established collaborative tri-state horticultural programs in the Pacific Northwest. During this period, Weiser also served on national science policy boards for the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and he created and chaired the national panel that led to restructuring of the National Academy of Science and its National Research Council Board on Agriculture. He served as 72nd President of the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) in 1981.

During a period of severe budget cuts, Weiser led an effort that resulted in the College of Agricultural Sciences and its 500 tenure track faculty members in 24 departments and research and extension centers across the state to view faculty scholarship as more than just published research results and to value and recognize faculty contributions to team efforts. He subsequently served on the Faculty Senate Committee that refined these concepts for the whole university. In 1995, OSU revised its promotion and tenure guidelines to reflect a larger vision of scholarship that permitted faculty members to do scholarship and document their scholarly achievements in teaching, advising, outreach, clinical work, performing arts, international or administrative assignments, as well as via traditional research and publications. Several other colleges and universities have used these concepts in considering and adopting similar changes.

Over his 33-year academic career, Weiser authored and co-authored about 180 publications. These publications were predominately in the areas of crop environmental stress physiology with emphasis on freezing injury and cold acclimation in plants, national science policy, interdisciplinary and regional coordination, college and university strategic plans, descriptive summaries of crop production and processing trends, and defining scholarship and describing it in several forms.

Weiser was born June 20, 1935 in Middlebury, Vermont, to Virgil Weiser and Ruth Haldorson. He grew up in Vermont, Virginia, Minnesota, North and South Dakota. In 1953, he married Jo Ann Tryznka (1935-1971), and they had four children: Russell, Jacqueline, Rachel, and Andrea. He married second, Adrienne Paulson (1938-) in 1972.