About Cornelia Clapp
Cornelia Maria Clapp (March 17, 1849 – December 31, 1934) was an American educator and zoologist, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, as well as its only female trustee during the first half of the 20th century. She was rated one of the top 150 zoologists in the United States in 1903, and her name was starred in the first five editions of American Men of Science (now American Men and Women of Science). == Education == Clapp matriculated at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1868 and completed the equivalent of an undergraduate program in 1871. (The school would not become a degree-granting college until 1888.) She would continue to pursue postgraduate studies while she taught at the school, beginning in 1874, when she went with colleague Lydia Shattuck to the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, an experimental residential summer school that provided women with postbaccalaureate education when it was not a formal option for them. Clapp would later call her time at Penikese "an opening of doors," where she first encountered a community of people deeply engaged with biological research and theory. Clapp received her first Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1889, which she earned by examination based on her first summer of work on the toadfish at the Marine Biological Laboratory rather than by taking a leave from Mount Holyoke to conduct research at Syracuse. In 1891, she published a paper entitled "Some Points in the Development of the Toadfish (Batrachus tau)" in which she described features of the embryonic development and nesting habits of the oyster toadfish now properly known as Opsanus tau. This is one of the earliest known publications on segmentation of the toadfish egg.
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