Dr. Dana Beyer has always been immersed in politics and social change. Growing up in New York City with her social conscience formed by traditional Jewish ethics, most of her strongest childhood memories and emotional milestones were formed by our nation's most courageous leaders. As a child, Dana was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement of the 1960's. She remembers President Kennedy's ringing words during his Inaugural Address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." It was Robert Kennedy's candidacy for President, during Dana's sophomore year in high school, that spurred her to take action and to become part of the campaigning process. And the first time she ever set foot in a church, and cried in public, was while viewing Senator Kennedy's casket lying in state in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. It was the strength and bravery of these slain leaders that forged Dana's dedication to continue the missions that these men were prevented from completing.

As a longtime resident of Chevy Chase, Dana has stood up for its residents by her activities with Equality Maryland and Equality Montgomery County. She has been an active member of her synagogue, Tiferet Israel Congregation, as well as a board member with teachthefacts.org, a Montgomery County parents' coalition dedicated to comprehensive sex education in our public schools. She has been actively involved in the upbringing of her sons, including her involvement with their athletic and musical extracurricular activities, and has supported quality education at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School. She has served on the Board of Advisors of the National Center for Transgender Equality, as well as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Legislative Council, the Human Rights Campaign's Federal Club, and the Democratic National Committee's Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council. These activities have been successful and rewarding, and it is now time to take Dr. Dana's experience, achievements and determination to Annapolis where she can continue to fight for Maryland's future.

She attended Orthodox Jewish day school and then commuted for four hours daily to attend the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. She is a 1974 Phi Beta Kappa graduate with distinction of the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences, and a 1978 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She finished school in less than four years to travel abroad and worked in Africa as a physician and surgeon in the northwestern Kenyan town of Kaimosi. She delivered babies, treated burn victims and Kenyans with many diseases no longer seen in the United States. She also saw first-hand the carnage wrought in neighboring Uganda by the tyrant Idi Amin, as refugees escaped across the border into Kenya.

Following her internship in internal medicine at the George Washington University Hospital, she completed her residency in eye surgery at the prestigious Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, Florida, rated annually as one of the top two eye institutes in the world.

Upon completing her residency, Dana once again traveled abroad. This time she used her new skills as an eye surgeon for the treatment of the Nepalese people in the foothills of the Himalayas, while working for the World Health Organization's Prevention of Blindness Program. The experience of performing cataract surgery with the equivalent of a can opener and other crude tools made her appreciate the blessings of having been trained in the United States.

Once back home, she took a job in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, serving the residents of South Mississippi as a glaucoma and retina specialist and drawing patients from as far away as El Salvador. She was one of the few surgeons in the area willing to see Medicaid patients, and provided quality care to a large population of underserved African-American and Cajun patients, performing nearly 10,000 surgical procedures during her career. She has also published in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Ophthalmology. In late 1990, Dr. Beyer retired from clinical practice, and after divorce she worked assiduously to rebuild her life, being the best parent she could to her two young children.

During the 1990's she learned to manage family investments with a team of like-minded investors. She returned to college at the University of Maryland to complete course work which could lead to a Master's degree in Organic Chemistry, a love of hers since college which she had never pursued. Married again in 1997, she soon had primary custody of her two growing boys.

Dr. Beyer has been active with a number of LGBT advocacy groups serving the gay and transgender communities, including Equality Maryland on whose board she sits, the National Center for Transgender Equality as a board advisor, the DES Sons International Network for which she serves as medical advisor, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She has worked on behalf of all students in the community with teachthefacts.org, a parents group organized in 2004 to support comprehensive sex education in the public schools and to vigorously oppose the imposition of a religiously-based abstinence-only curriculum which would isolate and demonize gay and transgender students. She helps collect and publicize research on the effects of endocrine disrupting compounds such as DES and DDT on human sexuality and reproduction, as well as providing personal support and mentoring. Last summer she presented a paper with her colleagues Dr. Scott Kerlin and Dr. Milton Diamond to the International Behavioral Development Symposium, delineating the impact DES has had in causing intersex and transgender variations in human beings. She runs regularly to stay healthy, having completed six marathons during the past four years, with plans to again participate in the Marine Corps Marathon this fall.

Her older son, David, is currently a junior at Brown University majoring in history, while his younger brother, Jonathan, is a certified EMT and will graduate from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School this spring. Jonathan will enter the University of Maryland at College Park this June as a neurobiology major, working towards becoming a trauma surgeon. David's interests are in law and finance. He's worked on the Kerry campaign and raises money for Environmental Action. Jonathan is also a very accomplished musician. Dana's brother, Larry, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.