Two Women Scientists Honored by Yale University’s Peabody Museum

The Yale Peabody Museum has announced four winner of its prestigious Addison Emery Verrill Medal, the museum’s highest honor. The medal honors “signal practitioners in the arts of natural history and natural sciences.” According to the prize committee “by advancing new understandings of how the natural world is changing, they help us confront the challenges of the 21st century.”

Two of the four winners are women.

May Berenbaum holds the Swanlund Chair and is the head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Her research focuses on chemical mechanisms underlying interactions between insects nd their host plants. Professor Berenbaum joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1980 and was promoted to full professor in 1990. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where she majored in biology. She holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University.

Naomi Pierce is the Hessel Professor of biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. She studies the ecology and evolution of species interactions. Dr. Pierce is a 1976 graduate of Yale University, where she majored in biology. She earned a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1991, Dr. Pierce taught at Princeton University in New Jersey for four years.