Dr. Beaudette was born in Wichita, Kansas on April 15, 1897. He received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Kansas State College in 1919 at the tender age of 22 and immediately took a position teaching avian diseases at Kansas State. He was fortunate to be working in the Infectious Disease Laboratory of Dr. Leland D. Bushnell. Researchers in those days would be considered generalists by today’s standards. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dr. Bushnell worked on poultry diseases among many species and included parasitic diseases in his research. Dr. Bushnell’s laboratory produced not just Fred Beaudette but also William R. Hinshaw who both would contribute to poultry disease research in the early days. Fred Beaudette showed early promise being promoted from instructor to assistant professor within two years. Two years later he was appointed Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. This position, and its filling by Dr. Beaudette, was created after campaigning by Dr. Arthur Goldhaft and others following a major commercial duck die off of undetermined origin. By 1925 he was named an Associate Professor and then Professor in 1929.

His arrival in New Jersey heralded a partnership that would affect the future of poultry disease prevention. In 1914, a young practitioner, Dr. Arthur Goldhaft, incorporated his practice in Vineland, New Jersey as a private poultry-testing laboratory to help in the statewide effort to eradicate pullorum disease. He named it Vineland Poultry Laboratory or Vipol. With Beaudette’s assistance, they began using a serological test for pullorum monitoring. By 1925, they were producing a crude tissue derived fowl pox vaccine. Soon, the USDA got into the picture by licensing biologics. The first licensed biologic was not a vaccine but a diagnostic, the pullorum test. In 1929, pox was licensed and in 1932 a vaccine for what was then called infectious laryngotracheitis (today this is infectious bronchitis). The laryngotracheitis vaccine was actually the first licensed Beaudette-Goldhaft collaboration and heralded an era of public private cooperation in vaccine development. These efforts would lead to the creation of the Northeast Conference of Workers in Pullorum Eradication in 1928 which would lead to the NPIP in 1935. Also in 1933, the Conference of Research Workers in the United States (today CRWAD) began including a focus on poultry diseases.

Some think Dr. Beaudette preferred flowery names for his virus isolates. In reality, he was naming his vaccine strains after the farmers whose chickens provided the strains. Thus names such as LaSota and Roakin while Komarov was one of his staff members. He also originated the B1 strain of Newcastle disease virus which was later developed into a lentogenic vaccine strain by a former Beaudette graduate student, Dr. Hitchner. Through Vineland labs, he introduced vaccine candidate strains for infectious bronchitis, avian encephalomyelitis, infectious laryngotracheitis and others. These vaccines came at a time when poultry flocks were smaller and farm labor was abundant. They would not have been suitable for mass application that was required later.