Dorothy M. Skinner, PhD, (1930–2005) was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She graduated from Watertown High School, where she was Best Girl Athlete. At Tufts University, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and was on the women’s basketball team and a member of the Marlins, an aquatic ballet group. After earning her BA (Biology and Chemistry) in 1952, she was Assistant Dean of Admissions at Tufts for two years.
She attended Harvard University (1954–1958) and began her research on crustaceans. Her thesis research was on Gecarcinus lateralis, the Bermuda land crab. After completing her thesis, Dorothy took up post-doctoral positions in the biochemistry departments at Harvard, Yale, and Brandeis. She joined the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at New York University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 1962. In 1966, Dorothy and her husband, John Cook, took positions in the Biology Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where they worked in their respective fields until retirement more than 30 years later.
At ORNL, Dorothy started as a staff scientist, progressed to senior staff scientist, and eventually became group leader for Growth and Regeneration and for Genome Organization. It took hard work; laboratory culture was not welcoming to women at that time. Dorothy overcame these and other obstacles to advancement by refusing to take no for an answer—she looked for, and often found, alternative routes to get what she needed. For instance, when told she could not have graduate students through the University of Tennessee, she arranged to become an adjunct at East Tennessee State University.
Dorothy authored nearly 90 publications, including articles in Nature, Science, Cell, and PNAS, many of which are “classics” and still cited today. In 1994, The Crustacean Society honored Dorothy with an Award for Excellence in Research for a “lifetime of investigative achievements and for mentoring new trainees in the field.” Her many contributions were recognized with a symposium at the 1998 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Boston (American Zoologist, volume 39, number 3). Other honors were a Women in Cell Biology Career Recognition Award of the American Society for Cell Biology (1987), a Technical Achievement Award from Martin Marietta Energy Systems (1990), a Scholar-Athlete Award from Tufts (1993), and a Distinguished Service Award from the Tufts Alumni Association (1994).
Throughout her life she devoted much effort to promoting the equal treatment of women in science. She was one of the “founding mothers” of the East Tennessee Chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS ) in 1983. She joined the Board of Directors of National AWIS in 1992 as chair of the Membership Committee and was elected to the position of AWIS Councilor in 1997. The East Tennessee Chapter of AWIS granted Dorothy their award for Distinguished and Sustained Contributions to Science in 1986, while National AWIS honored her for distinguished contributions in 1994 and named her a Charter Fellow in 1996.
Dorothy Skinner passed away on February 12, 2005.
This obituary was originally published by the Journal of Crustacean Biology on July 1, 2005.