56 Women entomologists

Gail S. Anderson is a forensic entomologist, academic, and Associate Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is an instructor at the Canadian Police College, a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, as well as a member of the Canadian Identification Society and the International Association for Identification.

Mary Ball (1812–1898) was an Irish naturalist and entomologist most noted for her studies of Odonata and for her discovery of the stridulation in aquatic bugs in the family Corixidae.

Mary Elizabeth Barber was a pioneering British-born amateur scientist of the nineteenth century. Without formal education, she made a name for herself in botany, ornithology and entomology. She was also an accomplished poet and painter, and illustrated her scientific contributions that were published by learned societies such as the Royal Entomological Society in London, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and the Linnean Society of London.

May Roberta Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants, and the implications of these interactions on the organization of natural communities and the evolution of species. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was named editor-in-chief of its journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019; she is also a member of the American Philosophical Society (1996), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996). She has held a Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair in entomology since 2012, which is the highest title a professor can hold at the University of Illinois. In 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Hazel Elizabeth Branch (1886–1973) was an American entomologist. Branch was affiliated with the American Society of Zoologists and the Academy for the Advancement of Science. Branch was also the president of the Kansas Academy of Science.

Annette Frances Braun (1884–1978) was an American entomologist and leading authority on microlepidoptera, kinds of moths. Her special interest was moths whose larvae live as leaf miners.

Caroline Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, was a consort of Baden, a dilettante artist, scientist, collector and salonist.

Flaminia Catteruccia is an Italian professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, studying the interactions between malaria and the Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit the parasites.

Leila Gay Forbes Clark (1887-1964) was an entomologist and librarian at the Smithsonian Institution. She was the second woman to direct the Smithsonian's library. Prior to her work at the Smithsonian, she worked as a librarian at Wellesley College, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, and the US Department of Agriculture. She joined the Smithsonian in 1929 and spent the rest of her career there becoming director in 1942. During her tenure she oversaw the merger of the main Smithsonian Library with the U.S. National Museum Library which resulted in the centralized Smithsonian Libraries system currently in place.

Margaret James Strickland Collins was an African-American child prodigy, entomologist (zoologist) specializing in the study of termites, and a civil rights advocate. Collins was nicknamed the “Termite Lady” because of her extensive research on termites. Together with David Nickle, Collins identified a new species of termite called Neotermes luykxi. When Collins earned her PhD., she became the first African American female entomologist and the third African American female zoologist.

Koncordie Amalie Dietrich was a German naturalist who was best known for her pioneering work in Australia from 1863 to 1872, collecting specimens for the Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg.

Lauren Esposito is the Assistant Curator and Schlinger Chair of Arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences. She is the co-founder of the network 500 Queer Scientists.

Adele Marion Fielde was a social activist, Baptist missionary, scientist, and writer.

Thelma Finlayson was a Canadian entomologist. She was one of the first female scientists to work at a federal government's research branch and was Simon Fraser University's first professor emerita upon her retirement in 1979.

Norma Ford Walker was a Canadian scientist who pioneered the development of medical genetics as a research field. Though she began her academic career as an entomologist, working as an invertebrate zoologist at the University of Toronto, she became interested in medical genetics in the 1930s, and researched the medical genetics of the then famous Dionne Quintuplets. She was an original founding member of the American Society of Human Genetics and between 1947 and 1962, was the first director of the Department of Genetics at what was then the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children. She was a strong advocate for women in science, and supervised many women would later become the first appointed department heads of human genetics at many Canadian universities. Her academic career spanned six decades and she published prolifically in both human genetics and entomology. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1958.

Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine, was a Victorian lepidopterist, natural history illustrator, diarist, and traveller who published in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation. She is also known for her personal diaries, which were edited into two volumes by W.F. Cater for the popular market and published posthumously.

Deborah M. Gordon is a biologist, appointed as a professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University.

Alice E. Gray was an American entomologist and origamist. She worked as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York for 43 years, writing, illustrating, and creating large models of insects. Known as the "Bug Lady", she conducted outreach and education in the museum, in local schools, and appeared on The Tonight Show. She began practicing origami first as an extension of her interest in insects, starting a tradition of using origami creatures to decorate the museum's Christmas tree. In the 1960s, she became more involved with the origami community and, in 1978, co-founded the Friends of the Origami Center of America in New York with Lillian Oppenheimer and Michael Shall, now known as OrigamiUSA.

Dulcie Winifred Catherine Denison,, known professionally as Dulcie Gray, was a British singer and actress of stage, screen and television, a mystery writer and lepidopterist.

Beverley Anne Holloway is a New Zealand entomologist. Holloway is a preeminent lucanid systematist and was awarded the New Zealand Commemoration Medal in 1990 for services to New Zealand as a scientist. She has also been elected a Fellow of the Entomological Society of New Zealand.

Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti was a Czech physician interested in tropical diseases and entomology.

Cynthia Evelyn Longfield was a British entomologist. She was an expert on the dragonfly and an explorer. She was called "Madame Dragonfly" for her extensive work. She was passionately fond of dragonflies and her dominant area of interest was natural history. She travelled extensively and published The Dragonflies of the British Isles in 1937. She worked as a research associate at the Natural History Museum, London. Longfield was the expert on the dragonflies at the museum, researching particularly African species.

Dr. Clara Southmayd Ludlow, the first woman known to publish extensively on the taxonomy of mosquitoes and their occurrence in relation to the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases, forged a notable career in medical entomology during a time when women were rare among the ranks of entomologists, and she did so in association with the military, where the presence of women was even more rare. Details of her life have been addressed in two publications, from which the following summary is drawn.

Sophie Lutterlough (1910–2009) was an American entomologist. Lutterlough began working at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) as an elevator operator in the 1940s at a time when discriminatory hiring practices prevented African-Americans from working in a curatorial or scientific capacity at the Museum. In the late 1950s, after having gained extensive knowledge of the museum's exhibitions, she asked for and achieved a role in entomological work, eventually restoring hundreds of thousands of insects, classifying thousands. She co-identified 40 type specimens, specimens that stand as the representative example of the species. In 1979, a mite was named in her honor.

Mabel Josephine (Jo) Mackerras was an Australian zoologist, entomologist and parasitologist. Her research and life’s work contributed to entomology, veterinary medicine and medical science. Throughout her life she held a wide range of positions and duties that included Army medical officer, entomologist, medical scientist, and parasitologist. Mackerras was a major during WWII and served in the Army Malaria Research Unit. In an application for King’s Birthday Honours her work earned the citation,: "few women can have made a greater contribution to the Allied war effort".

Sidnie Milana Manton, FLS FRS was a British zoologist. She is known for making advances in the field of functional morphology. She is regarded as being one of the most outstanding zoologists of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Nesta "Pat" Marks was an Australian entomologist who described 38 new mosquito species, as well as new species of fruit flies, bugs, cockroaches and ticks. She had a PhD in insect physiology from the University of Cambridge and was a member of the Royal Entomological Society of London.

Anna Maurizio was a Swiss biologist who studied bees. She worked for more than three decades in the Department of Bees at the Liebefeld Federal Dairy Industry and Bacteriological Institute, where she developed new methods for determining the amount of pollen in honey.

Mary Isabel McCracken was an American entomologist, researcher and teacher.

Ximena McGlashan, later Ximena McGlashan Howard, was an American entomologist, and a "butterfly farmer" based in Truckee, California.

Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family. Merian was one of the early European naturalists to observe insects directly.

Lois Kathryn Miller was an American geneticist and academic. She was a Distinguished Research Professor of Genetics and Entomology at the University of Georgia. A graduate of Upsala College, she taught at the University of Idaho before moving to Georgia. Miller's research was related to baculoviruses, which infect agricultural pests. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Corrie S. Moreau is an evolutionary biologist and entomologist with a specialty in myrmecology, the study of ants. She is currently a professor and curator at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Moreau studies the evolution, ecology, biogeography, systematics, and diversification of insects and their microbial gut-symbionts using molecular and genomic tools. She has also been an advocate for increasing women and diversity in the sciences.

Ann Haven Morgan was an American zoologist and ecologist.

Emily L. Morton was an American entomologist and scientific illustrator. She was a co-author at onset of "The Life-Histories of the New York Slug Caterpillars" series.

Mary Esther Murtfeldt was an American entomologist, botanist, botanical collector, writer and editor. She undertook research on the life histories of insects, describing several species new to science and wrote extensively on entomology. Murtfeldt created a collection of plant specimens that contributed to the scientific knowledge on the plants of Missouri.

Judith (Judy) H. Myers is a Canadian-American ecologist. In 2014 she was elected president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. Professor Myers is well-known for her decades-long research into plant-animal-microbe interactions, including insect pest outbreaks, viral pathogens of insects, and pioneering work on biological control of insects and plants, particularly invasive species. Throughout her career she has advocated strongly for both the public understanding of science and for increasing the number of women in the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She was awarded the 2018 Society for Experimental Biology Presidential Award.

Mary De la Beche "Minnie" Nicholl FES was a lepidopterist and mountaineer.

Karen Suzanne Oberhauser is an American conservation biologist with a specific interest in monarch butterflies.

Eleanor Anne Ormerod was a pioneer English entomologist. Based on her studies in agriculture, she became one of the first to define the field of agricultural entomology. She published an influential series of articles on useful insects and pests in the Gardeners' Chronicle and the Agricultural Gazette along with annual reports from 1877 to 1900. These annual reports were produced by summarizing information provided by her network of correspondents from across Britain. Belonging to the landed gentry, she worked as an honorary consulting entomologist with the Royal Agricultural Society of England and received no pay for any of her work. She also promoted the use of paris green as an insecticide and called for the extermination of the house sparrow.

Edith Marion Patch was an American entomologist and writer. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she received a degree from the University of Minnesota in 1901 and originally embarked on a career as an English teacher before receiving the opportunity to organize the entomology department at the University of Maine. She became the head of the entomology department in 1904, and, despite misgivings from several male colleagues about having a female department head, she remained in this post until her retirement in 1937. Edith Patch is recognized as the first truly successful professional woman entomologist in the United States.

George Williams Peckham and Elizabeth Maria Gifford Peckham were a married couple who were early American teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists, specializing in animal behavior and in the study of jumping spiders and wasps.

Ida Laura Pfeiffer, née Reyer, was an Austrian explorer, travel writer, and ethnographer. She was one of the first female travelers, whose bestselling journals were translated into seven languages. She journeyed an estimated 32,000 kilometers by land and 240,000 kilometers by sea through Southeast Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, including two trips around the world from 1846 to 1855. She was a member of geographical societies of both Berlin and Paris, but was denied membership by the Royal Geographical Society in London as it forbade the election of women before 1913.

Naomi E. Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology at Harvard University and a world authority on butterflies. Pierce is the university's Curator of Lepidoptera, a position once held by Vladimir Nabokov.

Lynn Moorhead Riddiford is an American entomologist and developmental biologist. She was a first female faculty member in the Harvard Biology Department where she served as an assistant and associate professor. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington. In 1997, she was the first awardee of the Recognition Award in Insect Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology from the Entomological Society of America. Riddiford studies the endocrinology of insects, specifically the tobacco hornworm.

Sofie Rostrup was a Danish entomologist and teacher. She has been described as the founder of agricultural entomology in Denmark.

Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild was a British natural scientist and author with contributions to zoology, entomology, and botany.

Grace Adelbert Sandhouse (1896–1940) was an American entomologist.

Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon was an American entomologist, educator, historian, author, and museum curator. She worked closely with zoologist Alpheus Hyatt at the Boston Society of Natural History, and she was the curator of the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts, for a quarter of a century.

Mary Talbot was an American entomologist and zoologist known for her studies of the ecology and behavior of ants. She was a Professor and Chair of Biology at Lindenwood College. She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago under Alfred E. Emerson and studied ants for more than fifty years, predominantly in the Edwin S. George Reserve at the University of Michigan.

Mary Lua Adelia Davis Treat was a naturalist and correspondent with Charles Darwin. Treat's contributions to both botany and entomology were extensive—four species of plants and animals were named after her, including an amaryllis, Zephyranthes treatae, and two ant species.

Leonila Vázquez García, known as Leonila Vázquez, was a Mexican entomologist and awardee of the Mexican Entomology Society's 1971 Entomological Merit medal. She is known for the study of the biology of the cochineal, an insect species used to create the red dye carmine. She was also a renowned butterfly researcher, contributing the first butterfly section to the Encyclopedia of Mexico and describing 39 new species to science throughout her career.

Mary Ward was an Irish naturalist, astronomer, microscopist, author, and artist. She was killed when she fell under the wheels of an experimental steam car built by her cousins. As the event occurred in 1869, she is the first person known to have been killed by a motor vehicle.

Jessica Lee Ware is a Canadian-American evolutionary biologist and entomologist. She is the associate curator of Odonata & non-holometabolous insect orders at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. In addition, she is a principal investigator at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics and an associate professor for the Richard Gilder Graduate School. She studies the evolution of insect physiology and behavior, particularly dragonflies and dictyoptera, as well as their biogeography. Ware was a contributor to a major study of the phylogenomics of insect evolution, and developed molecular phylogeny of hexapoda.

Wendy Wintersteen is an American academic administrator serving as the 16th President of Iowa State University.