Cornelia Clapp
Cornelia Maria Clapp (March 17, 1849 – December 31, 1934) was an American zoologist and academic specializing in marine biology. She was born in Montague, Massachusetts, the first daughter and oldest child of two teachers, and was rated as one of the top zoologists in the United States in her lifetime. Clapp attended Syracuse University and the University of Chicago, earning both the first and second Ph.D. degrees awarded to women in the United States, in 1889 from Syracuse and 1896 from Chicago. Mount Holyoke’s Cornelia Clapp Laboratory, built in 1924 to house the school’s biology classes , was named in her honor. Education and career. Clapp completed the equivalent of an undergraduate program at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (the forerunner of today’s Mount Holyoke College) in 1871 before spending one year as a Latin teacher at a boys' boarding school, Potter Hall, in Andalusia, Pennsylvania. She returned to Mount Holyoke in 1872, teaching mathematics and natural history before becoming the college's gymnastics instructor from 1876 to 1891. Clapp continued her extensive postgraduate studies at Louis Agassiz’s Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, Buzzard's Bay, MA in 1874. She adopted Agassiz's  dictum "Study nature, not books!" and applied it to her own teaching. She introduced her learned knowledge via an embryology course at Mount Holyoke, supplanted by specimens from alumni abroad. Along with other New England entomologists, Clapp collected insects from the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the summer of 1875 and from the mid-Atlantic states in 1877. (Stops included the Johns Hopkins University marine station in Beaufort, SC and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.) Clapp also completed brief studies on chick embryos and earthworms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under W.T. Sedgwick and at Williams College  in the early 1880s. Beginning in 1888, Clapp was affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA. In 2021, the Marine Biological Laboratory renamed their primary lecture hall to be the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium. While at MBL, Clapp conducted laboratory research and later became a lecturer and a trustee. Her doctoral dissertation on toadfish was published in the "Journal of Morphology" in 1889. When Mount Holyoke made the transition from seminary to college in 1888, Clapp took a three-year leave in order to obtain a doctorate at the University of Chicago. When she returned to Mount Holyoke , she helped organize the department of zoology, and in 1904 she was named professor of zoology. Although she was primarily known as an educator and did not author many scientific research papers, she was named in 1906 as being among the 150 most prominent zoologists in the U.S. by the journal "American Man of Science". Marine Biological Laboratory. Clapp was the First MBL Female Investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory and served as Librarian and Trustee. Her affilliation with the institution ran from its opening in 1888 to her death in 1934. Clapp was instrumental in helping to establish the  fledgling Marine Biological Laboratory, of which she was one of the students during MBL's inaugural season in 1888. She was adamant about the need for a library in Woods Hole with subscriptions to the top scientific journals, and she served as the first MBL librarian. In that role, she initiated an exchange program whereby the MBL sent out its "Biological Bulletin" and received other international journals in return, which over time added up to a magnificent collection. Clapp was elected to the MBL Board of Trustees in 1910. While three Boston women had been appointed trustees of the MBL  upon its founding (Florence M. Cushing, Susan Minns, and Anna D. Phillips), women disappeared from the board after an 1897 shake-up, when the lab’s founders ceded control of the board to a national cadre of scientists. Over the next 50 years, Clapp was one of only two women (along with Ethel Brown Harvey in the 1950s) to be elected an MBL Trustee, a position she held for the rest of her life. In 2021, the Marine Biological Laboratory renamed their primary lecture hall to be the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium. Legacy. At a time when the world of science  was just opening up to women, Cornelia Clapp's influence as a teacher was great and enduring. While she published little during her career, her major influence was to extend scientific knowledge and opportunity to women through education. Her direct teaching manner can be felt in the experience of Louise Baird Wallace, who arrived at Mount Holyoke in 1891. Her school principal in Ohio told her: “You ought to study under Dr. Clapp. She keeps live frogs in tanks.” Of Clapp, Louise wrote, “I came, I saw; she conquered. I felt then and have felt ever since that I was  never fully alive until I knew her.”