Caroline Burling Thompson
American entomologist
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Caroline Burling Thompson (July 27, 1869 – December 5, 1921) was an American entomologist and a professor of zoology at Wellesley College. She studied the brains of ants and termites, and was the first woman scientist to publish a study of ribbon worms.
Caroline Burling Thompson | |
|---|---|
Caroline Burling Thompson, from the 1922 yearbook of Wellesley College | |
| Born | July 27, 1869 Germantown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | December 5, 1921 (aged 52) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupations | Entomologist, college professor |
Early life and education
Thompson was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1869, the daughter of Lucius Peters Thompson and Caroline Jones Burling Thompson.[1][2] She attended the Drexel Institute,[3] and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1898, one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn (the other was her classmate, Louise Hortense Snowden).[4] She completed a Ph.D. at Penn in 1901;[5] her doctoral advisor was Edwin Conklin.[3]
Career
Thompson taught zoology at Wellesley College beginning in 1901; she became a full professor in 1916.[5] She was the first woman to publish research on nemerteans, or ribbon worms.[6] She was a delegate to an international zoological congress in Graz in 1910. She worked with the USDA's Bureau of Entomology from 1917.[5]
Publications
Thompson's articles appeared in scholarly journals including Science,[7] Journal of Comparative Neurology,[8] Journal of Morphology,[9][10] and The Biological Bulletin.[11][12]
- Preliminary Description of Zygeupolia Littoralis: A New Genus and New Species of Heteronemertean (1900)[13]
- Zygeupolia Litoralis, a New Heteronemertean (1901)[14]
- The Commissures and the Neurocord Cells of the Brain of Cerebratulus Lacteus (1908)[15]
- "The Wellesley College Fire" (1914)[7]
- "The brain and the frontal gland of the castes of the 'White Ant,'leucotermes flavipes, kollar" (1916)[8]
- "Origin of the Castes of the Common Termite, Leucotermes flavipes Kol" (1917)[9]
- "The development of the castes of nine genera and thirteen species of termites" (1919)[11]
- "The Question of the Phylogenetic Origin of Termite Castes" (1919, with Thomas Elliott Snyder)[12]
- "The ‘third form,’the wingless reproductive type of termites: Reticulitermes and Prorhinotermes" (1920, with Thomas Elliott Snyder)[10]
- "The castes of Termopsis" (1922, published posthumously)[16]