In this Issue
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  Fall 2024
  
  Above All
  My friends, and some of my professors, even, are not on campus with me anymore. But the trees are.More
  
  On the Frontlines of Feminism
  For 50 years, researchers at what is now the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) have conducted groundbreaking interdisciplinary studies on social issues such as the effects of placing children in child care, gender equity in education, and the role of social media in adolescents’ lives. From the beginning, its mission has been to deploy rigorous academic research to address real-world problems.More
  
  Alumnae Achievement Awards 2024
  The 2024 recipients of the Alumnae Achievement Award are Claire Parkinson ’70, climate change scientist and social justice advocate; Joanne Berger-Sweeney ’79, college president and professor of neuroscience; and Amy Weaver ’89, business leader and…More
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Heirloom Science Instruction

John Cameron, professor emeritus of biology, has cataloged some 1,600 objects from labs past. As Wellesley looks to the future of science on campus, Cameron showed us some of his favorite items from its past.

By Lisa Scanlon Mogolov ’99
Photography by Lisa Abitbol

Window on Wellesley,

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Antique wooden hydrodeik

College Hall Relic

Cameron spotted this tool in the Science Center’s collection, a hygrodeik that measures humidity, in a photo of its previous life in College Hall’s library. Cameron suspects that the instrument was saved from the library during the 1914 fire.

Rare Bird

Many of the taxidermied animals that overlooked the Focus have found homes at other institutions, but Wellesley kept those whose species are extinct: a passenger pigeon (above) and a Carolina parakeet.

Budding Interest

Henry Durant personally ordered a complete set of larger-than-life papier-mâché botanical teaching models made by Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux in France. Some of the collection now resides near Global Flora.

Early X-Rays

Shortly after Wellesley physics professor Sarah Frances Whiting learned in 1886 about Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, she used this Crookes tube to make her own.

Face Off

Another Auzoux piece in Wellesley’s collection is a life-sized model of a human head. The College also has a life-sized model of a female body, one of only a handful in existence.

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Science+Technology

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