Caroline Burling Thompson
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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 |
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.
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]