Harriet Exline Frizzell
Harriet Idola Exline Frizzell was an American arachnologist. She was the first woman to receive the Sterning Fellowship at Yale.
Life and education
Harriet Exline Lloyd was born in Washington in 1909. At the age of sixteen, she entered Reed College with to study language and literature, but soon became interested in chemistry and biology. After that, she did a six-year graduate study at the University of Washington, spending summers and Fridays at Harbor Biological Station.In 1936, Exline earned her PhD at the University of Washington and was awarded the Sterning Fellowship at Yale for postdoctoral studies in arachnological research with Professor Alexander Petrunkevitch. She was the first woman to receive this scholarship.
On 29 August 1938, Exline married a fellow scientist, Donald L. Frizzell, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She chose marriage over fellowship renewal and sailed for Peru at the end of academic year. They remained in Ecuador and Peru during the next five years, working together and individually on arachnology and paleontology researches.
Work
In September 1943, they went to Seattle where she stayed until the end of World War II working as an instructor in the zoology department at the University of Washington. Having finished the academic year at the university in 1945, Exline joined her husband in Austin. For the next three years, she worked as a guest researcher in spiders in the Department of Zoology at the University of Texas.In 1948, the Frizzels moved to Rolla, where she continued her research on spiders at the University of Missouri. During this time, she was named a fellow and research associate of the California Academy of Sciences.
Exline worked jointly with her husband on holothurian sclerites and co-authored with him Monograph of fossil holothurian sclerites, published in 1955.
In 1958, Don L. Frizzel wrote that his wife was deeply involved in micropaleontological research and co-authored with him three papers. In 1958–1959, she went on a holiday trip to Gulf Coast where she collected spiders and continued her spider studies.
From 1960 until 1967, she worked as a taxonomist and consultant for a National Science Foundation project in spider biology at the University of Arkansas. She was devoting around one third of her time to this project.
Exline also completed large amounts of work within her own home laboratory, in which she had personally curated a sizeable collection of spiders.
Her work American Spiders of the Genus Argyrodes , published in 1962, was highly appreciated by the researcher A. Chickering who called it "the most comprehensive work published to date on this highly interesting but difficult genus of "comb-footed" spiders".
After the death of Professor Petrunkevitch in 1964, Exline organized and edited his unpublished works, publishing them posthumously.
In September 1967, Exline's health rapidly declined and she was hospitalized. She died in February 1968. After her death, her spider collections were given to the California Academy.
The Harriet Exline Frizzell Memorial Fund was created in her honour.