Robert Quarles Marston (February 12, 1923 – March 14, 1999) was an American physician, research scientist, governmental appointee and university administrator. Marston was a native of Virginia, and, after earning his bachelor's, medical and research degrees, he became a research scientist and medical professor. He served as the dean of the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and the president of the University of Florida. Early life and education He was born in Toano, Virginia, a small unincorporated community in James City County near Williamsburg, in 1923, the fifth child of Dandridge Warren Marston and Helen Virginia Smith Marston. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia with a bachelor of science degree in 1944. While attending the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in Richmond, Virginia, he married Ann Carter Garnett in 1946. Following his graduation from MCV with a doctor of medicine degree (M.D.) in 1947, he received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. While studying at Oxford's Lincoln College, Marston worked under Nobel Prize-winner Howard Florey, Norman Heatley and other scientists from the research team that developed penicillin as the first antibiotic, and graduated with a degree in research science. Scientist, administrator, educator After completing his internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and a one-year residency at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, Marston joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a medical researcher with the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, examining the infectious after-effects of whole-body irradiation, from 1951 to 1953. He finished his residency at MCV in 1954. The Markle Foundation awarded Marston a grant as a "gifted practitioner" in the furtherance of his academic medical career. Thereafter, he taught for three years on the MCV faculty, and lectured at the University of Minnesota's Medical School for a year as an assistant professor of bacteriology and immunology. He rejoined MCV in 1959, as the assistant student affairs dean and an associate medical professor. Marston was chosen to be the dean of the University of Mississippi's School of Medicine and director of the university's Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement in 1961. Marston was hired with the tacit understanding that he would integrate the medical school and medical center to comply with Federal law and maintain the medical school's accreditation.