Women in Science and Engineering at Yale (2020 Edition)

Anna Maria Rhoda Erdmann (1870–1935), Ph.D.

Portrait of R. Erdmann (c.1926). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Bildarchiv: original portrait taken by the Berlin photographer Alexander Binder (1888–1929) from Hoppe, 2012.

Rhoda Erdmann was a biologist and a cytologist. She was the first woman lecturer at Yale, serving in the biology department and Osborn Zoological Laboratory in 1916. Her appointment was as a Research Fellow 1913–1919. While working at Yale with Lorande Loss Woodruff (1879–1947), she studied parthenogenesis and learned updated techniques in tissue culture from Ross G. Harrison (1870–1959), head of the lab. Sadly, her tissue culture work, which developed active cultures for immunizing chickens by inoculating bone marrow, led to misunderstandings in the anti-German atmosphere at the time. She was subsequently removed from her position and detained for four and a half months in the Waverly House (prison) in New York. In 1922, in Germany, she published the first German textbook with detailed instructions on tissue culture methods and how this could be applied to cancer research. In 1933, she was once again held in jail, this time for helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany. Rhoda Erdmann is known for founding a journal for experimental cell research, Archiv für Experimentelle Zellforschung, in which scientists from all over the world contributed.