In honor of Black History Month, we’re featuring weekly stories of legendary, trailblazing Black scientists. To also celebrate #WomenInScience Day today, our first feature is about a pioneering Black female entomologist!
Margaret James Strickland Collins
Dr. Collins, affectionately known as the “Termite Lady”, was the first Black female entomologist. She was born in Institute, West Virginia in 1922. Since her father was a professor of agriculture at West Virginia State College (an HBCU; Historically Black Colleges and Universities), she spent her early years surrounded by a community of Black intellectuals. She was also an avid reader and a child prodigy — she was allowed to check out books from West Virginia State College’s library at the age of six, and at the age of fourteen, she began pursuing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology there.
After graduating, she attended the zoology doctoral program at the University of Chicago, which is where she met Alfred Emerson, who was an entomologist that specialized on termites. Under his mentorship, she began her own studies into termite biology, although because of prejudices he held against women performing fieldwork, she was only able to study his insect collections for her dissertation instead of observing them in nature. His sexism, however, did not ultimately deter her: in 1950, she was awarded her PhD in zoology, which made her the third Black woman to ever earn a PhD in this subfield of biology (the first was Roger Arliner Young (University of Pennsylvania, 1940)), and during her time as a professor at Howard University, Florida A&M University, and the University of DC, she was an avid field biologist, traveling to collect termites from at least a dozen countries.
Her accomplishments include co-identifying a new species of termite (Neotermes luykxi), and serving as the curator of the termite collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, a collection which is now named after her. She is also known for her groundbreaking research on tolerance and resistance to drying in different species of termites.
To learn more about her story, please visit: https://bioone.org/journals/florida-entomologist/volume-99/issue-2/024.099.0235/Child-Prodigy-Pioneer-Scientist-and-Women-and-Civil-Rights-Advocate/10.1653/024.099.0235.full
Happy Women In Science Day!
-Vicky
🦀 origami crab 🏝️ 