A. Howard and Clara Dean O. Christensen Endowed Scholarship Fund Howard & Clara Christensen Biography

A. HOWARD CHRISTENSEN (1908-1998) grew up on a ranch in Ephraim, Utah. Each summer, he herded his father’s sheep in the mountains. He played football and majored in physics, graduating from BYU in 1930. Then he moved to New York City, where he worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories and did graduate work in physics at Columbia University. He was one of the early members of the group that invented the transistor, the predecessor of semiconductors, making him one of the pioneers of the electronic age.

In 1938, he married CLARA DEAN OLIVER (1905-2002), who had grown up in Ft. Union in the Salt Lake Valley, on a farm raising chickens primarily. At the age of 14, she was devastated when her father died of a kidney disorder. After teaching elementary and junior high school, she moved to New York City, where she did graduate work and taught business education (especially bookkeeping, typing, and shorthand) at the high school and college levels.

They were parents of two sons, Kurt (1941) and Dale (1945), and would have welcomed more children had that blessing occurred. As active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Howard served primarily in the Elders Quorum and missionary work, while Dean served as a Sunday School teacher, a trainer of teachers in the church, and in the stake Young Women organization. After retiring, both were ordinance workers in the Washington, DC, temple.

We are honoring them with a scholarship because both were firm believers in the value of education in blessing the student, his or her family, the church, and society at large. We sometimes joke that teaching is “the family disease” since two of Dean’s siblings and four of Howard’s were teachers. Also, Kurt is a retired university teacher, and Dale is an effective teacher in church settings.

We chose BYU-Hawaii for this scholarship because Kurt spent several terms as a visiting professor at SASIN Graduate Institute of Business in Bangkok and one term at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We could think of no place where our scholarship could do more good than in the Asia-Pacific region. Wonderful things are happening there both economically and in the Church. We hope this scholarship will make a small contribution to these exciting developments.