page_title: Alice Catherine Evans
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Catherine Evans / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Alice C. Evans, in graduation dress
context_page_description: Alice Catherine Evans was a pioneering American microbiologist. She became a researcher at the US Department of Agriculture. There she investigated bacteriology in milk and cheese. She later demonstrated that Bacillus abortus caused the disease Brucellosis in both cattle and humans.
context_section_description: Evans was born on a farm in Neath, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, to William Howell, a farmer, and surveyor, and Anne B. Evans, a teacher. When Evans was five and six years old, she was taught at home by her parents and attended a one-room school house in Neath where she earned outstanding grades.  In 1886, Evans survived scarlet fever, as did her brother Morgan.
  She attended the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute in Towanda, where she played on a women's basketball team and later became a teacher. In her memoirs, she writes that she became a teacher because it was the only profession open to women, but she found it boring. After four years of teaching, she took free classes that were offered to rural teachers at Cornell University. After receiving a scholarship, she earned a B.S. in bacteriology from Cornell University in 1909, and was the first woman to receive a bacteriology scholarship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned her M.S. the following year.
caption: Alice C. Evans, in graduation dress
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