Ruth A. Boak; Prominent Rubella Researcher

Ruth Alice Boak of Camarillo, a retired pediatrician who performed breakthrough research on German measles, died Monday after a lengthy illness brought about by a stroke. She was 95.

Boak was born May 25, 1902, in Rochester, N.Y. She moved to Chatsworth in 1948 and took up permanent residence in Camarillo in 1981.

After earning her PhD and medical degree from Cornell University in 1940, Boak became a pediatrics doctor, serving as professor of infectious diseases, public health, epidemiology and microbiology for the UCLA School of Medicine, from which she retired in 1978.

Among her accomplishments, Boak performed breakthrough research on rubella with Dr. Charles M. Carpenter.

She researched the incidence and control of venereal disease among stateside enlisted men during World War II; she served her first Fulbright in Japan teaching medicine at the University of Tokyo in 1953, and her second teaching at the University of Tehran School of Medicine in 1960.

In 1963, she worked with the U.S. State Department to set up the University Airlangga School of Medicine in Surubaya, Indonesia, and followed that with service to the Sagada Mountain Province Hospital in the Philippines.

Boak received the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year award for medicine in 1955. She also served as civil service commissioner for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, was president of the Chatsworth Chamber of Commerce, and president of Equestrian Trails and the Business and Professional Women’s Club. In 1988 she traveled to Ireland, and in 1993 Boak made a farewell tour of Bali and Indonesia.

Boak is survived by Boak Ferris of Long Beach and Don R. Ferris of Lexington, Ky. Services will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at Pierce Brothers Griffin Mortuary, Camarillo. She will be interred beside her husband of 45 years, Air Force Col. Donald Lockhart Ferris, M.D., at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park, Camarillo.