Sarah E. Beard

Sarah Elizabeth Beard was an American medical researcher who trained as a nurse and retired in 1978 as a colonel in the United States Air Force. She was born in Truxton, New York, and trained as a teacher at the state teacher's college in Albany before graduating from the Brigham Hospital School of Nursing in Boston in 1947 and later earning a master's degree in nursing service administration at Syracuse University in 1961. After enlisting in 1951 she worked at Langley Air Force Base Hospital, as a flight nurse and as a flight nurse instructor. From 1961 she was a research scientist on decompression sickness at the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base, where she co-authored papers on the physiology of the human body in orbit, and her work was consulted in planning the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program. The Texas Division of the Air Force Association named her Outstanding Nurse of the Year in 1966, she chaired the Aerospace Medical Association's Flight Nurse Section from 1968 to 1970, and she was named a Fellow of that association in 1976. She died in Baldwinsville, New York, in 2012, aged 90.