The Carpenter Award for Academic and Research Achievements

Esther Carpenter Award Winners

BIOGRAPHY
Esther Carpenter, a distinguished alumna of Ohio Wesleyan, was born in Meriden, CT on June 4, 1903. Following graduation from high school in Stratford, CT, she enrolled at OWU where she majored in Zoology, receiving her A.B. in 1925. Ms. Carpenter then entered graduate school in Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, receiving her M.S. in 1927. After a year’s fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, she began work on her Ph.D. in the Department of Zoology at Yale University under the direction of Dr. Ross G. Harrison, a world renowned experimental embryologist. Her dissertation research on the development of ectodermal head structures in Ambystoma, as determined by vital staining and transplantation, was at the cutting edge of experimental embryology at that time. Dr. Carpenter received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1932.

Her interest in teaching was evident at least as early as her graduate days at Wisconsin, where she held a Teaching Fellowship. While at Yale, she was an assistant in Zoology at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven and later taught there for a year. In 1933, she began a long and substantive career in the Zoology department at Smith College in Northampton, MA, teaching courses including General Zoology, Histology and Cytology. The esteem in which she was held at Smith is indicated by her selection as the first recipient of the Myra M. Sampson Professorship in Zoology. She retired in 1968.

Dr. Carpenter selected, and succeeded in, challenging research areas. For example, her work on Ambystoma for her Ph.D. could be done only for a short time each spring, following collection of naturally laid eggs from the wild. Shortly after receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Carpenter spent time at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, an international center for tissue and organ culture; this experience, perhaps coupled with Dr. Harrison’s early culture work, stimulated her to focus her subsequent research on the differentiation of chick and rat thyroid glands in vivo and in vitro. She began this work when culture techniques were extremely rudimentary and contributed to their development, as evidenced by her role as a lecturer for several years during the 1950’s in a summer post-graduate course on tissue and organ culture sponsored by the Tissue Culture Association. She later learned, and utilized, transmission electron microscopy and radioactive isotope techniques in her work. Dr. Carpenter’s research, which resulted in numerous publications, was conducted with the assistance of occasional graduate students and grants from the Massachusetts and American Cancer Societies and the National Institutes of Health. However, she did much of the research work herself. Her colleague, Dr. Sampson, described her in the 1950’s: “Her great interest and skill in research, and her excellent training and use of extra-curricular time, have led to her important scientific contributions. She is recognized as the leading investigator in this country in the study of the development of the function in vitro of the thyroid gland…” Ohio Wesleyan recognized Dr. Carpenter’s contributions by awarding her an honorary D.Sc. in 1956.

Throughout her career, Dr. Carpenter sought out stimulating scientific opportunities. For several summers, beginning immediately following her graduation from OWU, she did research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA (as the recipient of the Zoology department’s Edward L. Rice Summer Scholarship in 1925); few other places in the world at that time had such a high concentration of outstanding biologists as Woods Hole in the summer. She was a research assistant in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, another exceptional laboratory. Later, she held a research fellowship for a year at Ohio State and returned to the Strangeways Laboratory for a sabbatical in 1953.

Dr. Carpenter was described by her colleague, Myra Sampson: “[She] is a considerate, self-reliant, attractive woman of unquestioned personal and professional integrity. She is interested in people, has a wide knowledge and appreciation of the culture of her own and of other nations, good judgment and good taste, and has demonstrated her adaptability while studying and traveling abroad.” For many years, she enjoyed spending summers at her home in Ludlow, VT.

Dr. Carpenter died in 2001 at the age of 98. The Esther Carpenter Award, awarded to a senior female major who best exemplifies the ideals of a liberal arts education and shows potential for future contributions to her profession and society at large, was established as the result of a bequest by Dr. Carpenter to Ohio Wesleyan in her will.

Biography by Anne E.Fry