Cornelia Clapp

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After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Clapp spent a year as a Latin teacher at a boys' boarding school, Potter Hall, in Andalusia, Pennsylvania. She returned to Mount Holyoke in 1872, teaching mathematics and natural history before becoming the college's gymnastics instructor from 1876 to 1891.

Clapp incorporated knowledge gained from her postgraduate studies at the Anderson School into her teaching, in particular adopting co-founder Agassiz's dictum "Study nature, not books!" For example, she introduced an embryology course, supplanted by specimens sent by alumni living abroad, to encourage study through hands-on laboratory experience instead of through books. Additionally, along with other New England entomologists, Clapp collected insects from the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the summer of 1875, as well as from various mid-Atlantic states, including the Johns Hopkins University marine station in Beaufort, South Carolina and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1877.

Clapp also completed brief studies on chick embryos and earthworms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Williams College in the early 1880s. In 1888, Clapp began her affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) during its inaugural session. While at the MBL, Clapp conducted laboratory research using specimens from the area and later became a lecturer and a trustee. In 1892, Clapp was one of the first women who joined the American Morphological Society (later the American Society of Zoologists and now the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology).

When she returned to Mount Holyoke after obtaining her doctoral degrees, she helped organize the department of zoology and develop its teaching facilities. She was named professor of zoology in 1904, fifteen years after her first Ph.D. Although she was primarily known as an educator and authored few scientific research papers, she was ranked one of the top 150 zoologists in the U.S. by a 1903 study reported in American Men of Science. She was named professor of zoology at her alma mater in 1904, fifteen years after her first Ph.D.

Clapp retired from teaching in 1916, though she would continue her research at the MBL and remain involved with the Mount Holyoke community as professor emeritus.

Mount Holyoke awarded Clapp an honorary Sc.D. in 1921, and in 1923, $600,000 in funds was raised for a new biology building to be named the Cornelia Clapp Laboratory in her honor. The building was completed in 1924.

By 1926, she was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as her name was included in a list of special committee members that year. The rest of the committee was composed entirely of men: David Starr Jordan, Liberty H. Bailey, J. McKeen Cattell, F. V. Coville, Barton W. Evermann, J. Walter Fewkes, Samuel Garman, Leland O. Howard, Herbert Spencer Jennings, Vernon Kellogg, John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, George H. Parker, Charles D. Walcott, and Edmund B. Wilson.

Clapp was the first female investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory and also served as librarian and trustee. Her affiliation with the institution ran from its opening in 1888 to her death in 1934. Clapp was instrumental in helping to establish the fledgling Marine Biological Laboratory, of which she was one of the students during MBL's inaugural season in 1888. She was adamant about the need for a library in Woods Hole with subscriptions to the top scientific journals, and she served as the first MBL librarian. In that role, she initiated an exchange program whereby the MBL sent out its Biological Bulletin and received other international journals in return, which over time added up to a magnificent collection.

Clapp was elected to the MBL Board of Trustees in 1910. While three Boston women had been appointed trustees of the MBL upon its founding (Florence M. Cushing, Susan Minns, and Anna D. Phillips), women disappeared from the board after an 1897 shake-up, when the lab's founders ceded control of the board to a national cadre of scientists. Over the next 50 years, Clapp was one of only two women (along with Ethel Brown Harvey in the 1950s) to be elected an MBL Trustee, a position she held for the rest of her life.

In 2021, the Marine Biological Laboratory renamed their primary lecture hall the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium.

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