page_title: Mildred Stratton Wilson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mildred Stratton Wilson / Career
context_page_description: Mildred Stratton Wilson was an American zoologist, whose work on copepods was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955.
context_section_description: Mildred Stratton Wilson established a solid record of scientific research without an advanced degree and without any official university affiliation. In 1938 Mildred Stratton Wilson started research, mostly as a volunteer, in the copepod collection at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D. C. with her research continuing the work of Light on copepods. She was appointed assistant curator of marine invertebrate zoology in 1944 during World War II. She kept this title until 1946. In 1946 she was named a Collaborator in Copepod Crustaceans of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1948, she remained a collaborator at NMNH, but her work took her to Alaska, where she was the Territorial Entomologist with the United States Army Corps of Engineers. She became consulting biologist for the Arctic Health Research Center in 1951. She was affiliated with them until 1967, when they moved the center to Fairbanks, Alaska. While she was there she did not receive a salary but did get a new microscope, postal privileges, and support to make collections in Alaska.  In 1955, Wilson was the first Alaskan resident to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She published her research regularly in scientific journals, including Freshwater Biology, Canadian Journal of Zoology, and Crustaceana. In the 1960s she was appointed of "Research Associate, Division of Crustacea, USNM", a title that she had for the rest of her life.
  She was also the first Alaskan to receive funding from the National Science Foundation, which she held from 1957 to 1967 for her work on freshwater copepods. Wilson became an Associate in Marine Science of the University of Alaska's Institute of Marine Science in 1968, to keep her NSF funding. Wilson wanted to create a monograph of the genus Diaptomus in North America, but was unable to complete it before her death.
caption: Unidentified species of Diaptomus from the Great Lakes
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