Undergraduate STEM Programs

The sciences at Albertus go back to the early days of our history. In 1927, Marcella O’Grady Boveri arrived at this fledgling college to establish a department of science.

Marcella's background was amazing for a woman of her time.

She was, in 1885, the first woman to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a concentration in biology; she studied comparative zoology and embryology at Bryn Mawr; and by 1893 she had become a full professor at Vassar.

Three years later, she was admitted to study science at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, the first woman ever granted acceptance to the science program there. At Wurzburg, she studied with Theodor Boveri, director of the Zoological–Zootomical Institute and one of the world’s first cancer researchers. They married in 1897 and worked together on the chromosome theory of cancer until his death in 1915.

Marcella Boveri remained in Germany until 1926 when she returned to the United States for what was supposed to be just a brief visit: however, fortuitously for Albertus, she learned from a friend who was married to a former Yale University dean that the new liberal arts college in New Haven was looking for a woman of distinction to create and run its science department. When her contacts at Yale assured her that the resources of its Osborn Zoological Laboratory and Yale libraries would be available to her, she accepted the offer from Albertus. Marcella Boveri remained at Albertus until she retired in 1943; she died in October 1950.