Class of 1870 - Chemisty
A native of Massachusetts, Ellen Henrietta Swallow entered Vassar at the age of 26, with only four years of prior formal education. She finished Vassar’s four-year program in two years and was then admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she became the first woman to earn a bachelor of chemistry degree in America. MIT denied her request to enter the doctoral program and then promptly voted not to admit women. However, she stayed on as an assistant to her professor and set up a laboratory in a new discipline, “sanitary chemistry.” In 1884, she was appointed to the faculty as an instructor in the new field, teaching the analysis of food, water, sewage, and air to future sanitary engineers. Richards is also remembered for her work for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. With colleague Thomas M. Drown, she analyzed more than 100,000 samples of the state’s water and sewage over a two-year period and then produced the world’s first water purity tables and the first state water quality standards in the U.S.
Class of 1878 - Gynecology/Women's Health
Born in 1857 in Stockton, Minnesota, where her family were “frontiersmen, surrounded by Indians,” Helen C. Putnam graduated from Vassar in 1878 and earned her M.D. from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1889. From 1891 until her “retirement” in 1922, she practiced medicine in Providence, Rhode Island. One of the nation’s first gynecologists, Putnam is credited with raising public awareness of the high childbirth mortality rate at the turn of the century and with launching a reform movement– increasing the number of visiting nurses, introducing prenatal care, and establishing sanitation standards for milk collection. A story is told that “at a meeting of the American Medical Association, a learned doctor who was to speak on social diseases declined to do so `because there were ladies present.’ Putnam rose to her feet, declared that she was not so squeamish, and proceeded to deliver an address on the subject. She was met with tumultuous applause, and her plea that social diseases be treated as ordinary contagious diseases, and be relieved of the social stigma attached to them, had much to do with further developments in that field of medical treatment.”
class of 1882 - Geography
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Ellen Churchill Semple earned her bachelor’s degree from Vassar in 1882 and her master’s in history and sociology, also from Vassar, in 1891. Between the first degree and the second, Semple made her first trip to Europe where she became acquainted with the work of Fredrich Ratzel, anthropogeographer, and was determined to study with him. Because German universities did not admit women, Semple listened to Ratzel’s lectures sitting in a chair outside the classroom. Eventually she was permitted to enroll in his seminars and under his tutelage became confident of her skills as a geographer. A master teacher and forceful writer, Semple was the first American geographer to carry on field investigations, and the first and only woman ever to receive the American Geographical Society’s highest award, the Cullum Medal.
Class of 1928 - Math/Physics
Born in New York City, Grace Murray Hopper graduated from Vassar, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1928 and from Yale with a Ph.D. in math and physics in 1934. After a short stint teaching at Vassar, she joined the U.S. Naval Reserves during World War II and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project. She became the third programmer of the world’s first large-scale computer, called the Mark I. “That was an impressive beast,” Hopper is reported to have said. “She was 51 feet long, eight feet high, and five feet deep.” Widely known as “the mother of computing,” Hopper coinvented the computer language COBOL and coined the terms “computer bug” and “debugging.” Legend has it that she coined the term after finding a moth inside a computer.
Class of 1948 - Astronomy
According to Women in Astronomy , Vera Cooper Rubin has been stargazing since she was a 10-year-old in Washington, D.C. She earned her bachelor’s in astronomy from Vassar in 1948, her master’s from Cornell in 1950, and her Ph.D. from Georgetown in 1954. Now a senior researcher at the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Rubin is credited with proving the existence of “dark matter,” or nonluminous mass, and forever altering our perceptions of the universe. According to Rubin’s and her colleagues’ calculations, 90% or more of the universe is made of this mysterious dark matter. Internationally renowned as an expert on the velocities of galaxies, Rubin took her share of knocks on her way up the science ladder. Her master’s thesis, presented to a 1950 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, met with severe criticism, and her doctoral thesis was essentially ignored, though her conclusions were later validated. “Fame is fleeting,” Rubin said when she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. “My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that’s my greatest compliment.”
Class of 1959 - Neurobiology
A native of Salem, Massachusetts, Patricia Goldman-Rakic earned her bachelor’s degree from Vassar in 1959 and her doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1963. After a brief stint as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, she became a research physiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, a position she left to join the faculty at Yale University School of Medicine. Goldman-Rakic was widely recognized for her research on the brain’s prefrontal cortex and the neural mechanisms underlying memory and disturbed thinking. She focused on understanding the causes and organic basis of schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of the thinking process and emotional responsiveness. Her honors are myriad: election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Fyssen Foundation Prize in Neuroscience, and the Lieber Prize by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, among many others.
Class of 1963 - Physics
Born in Hong Kong, Sau Lan Wu says she “dreamed of becoming a painter, but reading the biography of Marie Curie inspired me so much that I decided to devote my life to physics.” Wu came to the United States to attend college, graduated from Vassar summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and then earned her Ph.D. from Harvard. Working as a research associate at MIT, she was a member of the team that discovered a new particle in 1974, known as J/psi, or the charm quark. From there, Wu was appointed to the physics faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where she has twice been honored with named professorships. In 1979, she played a key role in the discovery of gluon, the “glue that holds quarks together to form particles such as protons and neutrons.” Wu and her collaborators on the gluon discovery were awarded the 1995 European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize. In 1996 she was elected to be a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Class of 1965 - Medicine
The daughter of a perfume manufacturer in Long Island City, Bernadine Healy remembers childhood outings to collect pond water to examine under the microscope her father had bought secondhand. While Healy has held many prestigious positions, including deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, her most influential role was as director of the National Institutes of Health. The first woman to hold that office, Healy orchestrated NIH’s first long-range strategic plan and fostered unprecedented coordination among the 24 NIH institutes. She is especially known for launching the $625-million Women’s Health Initiative. Now the dean of the College of Medicine at Ohio State University, Healy recently launched a major initiative that will change the clinical education curriculum for medical students who will be practicing in the year 2006 and beyond.
Class of 1967 - Toxicology/Earth Sci.
Ellen Kovner came to Vassar on full scholarship, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated summa cum laude without ever having set foot in a science classroom. “I did everything I could to avoid science,” she said in a 1994 Vassar Views interview. But in the late ’60s, she became interested in an emerging field–environmental science; earned her Ph.D. in engineering at Johns Hopkins; and did postdoctoral work at the School of Hygiene and Public Health. There, under Alan Goldberg, her adviser, and Julian Chisolm, one of the world’s leading authorities on the clinical manifestations of lead poisoning, Silbergeld did some of the first research on how lead affects the central nervous system–research that has prompted significant changes in public policy and raised public awareness of the dangers of lead. The winner of a $290,000 “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1993, Silbergeld is currently a professor of toxicology at the University of Maryland.
Class of 1971 - General/Orthopedic Surgery
An Africana studies major at Vassar, Claudia Thomas earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1975 and then completed her residency in general and orthopedic surgery at Yale in 1980. In response to the Alumnae and Alumni of Vassar College 1990 survey, Carty wrote, “My pursuit of orthopedic surgery proved to be an unusual career goal for a woman. Upon completion of my residency training in 1980, I became the first black female orthopedic surgeon in the country. It’s been extremely gratifying work, even though I’ve found myself predominantly in a man’s world.”