Mary Sears

Mary Sears (July 18, 1905 – September 2, 1997) was a Commander in the United States Naval Reserve and an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Early life and education Mary Sears was born on July 18, 1905, to Leslie and Edmund Sears in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was the oldest child, and had a younger brother and sister. In 1911, Leslie died from polio when she was 28-years-old. After his wife's death, Edmund moved to Europe and left his children in the care of relatives and nannies. During this time, one of their caretakers was their mother's friend, Sophie Bennett, who was a teacher at The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts. Sears enrolled in the Winsor school in 1915 as a fifth-grade student. Later that year, Edmund returned from Europe, and began dating Bennett, and married her several years later. They had three children together. Sears graduated from The Winsor School in 1923, and enrolled in Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Bennett was an alumna. She originally intended to major in Ancient Greek, but after taking a biology course taught by George Howard Parker decided to change her course of study. In 1927, she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in zoology and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. She remained at Radcliffe for graduate school, and earned a master's degree in 1929 and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1933. While a graduate student, she worked at Harvard University with Henry Bigelow, a founder and the first Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Career Postdoctoral research After completing her doctorate, Sears studied plankton at WHOI during the summers, and taught throughout the school year. She was a faculty member at Wellesley College from 1938 to 1943, and also worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. During this time, she also served as a research assistant at Harvard from 1933 to 1949 and as a tutor at Radcliffe from 1934 to 1940. Sears was present for many of the early discussions organizing WHOI as it acquired its first ships, the 142-foot ketch Atlantis and 40-foot coastal vessel Asterias, and its first laboratory, later named the Bigelow Laboratory. Sears also researched the annual fluctuations of marine zooplankton. With Bigelow, Sears published papers on the salinity and the zooplankton of the area from Cape Cod to Chesapeake Bay, and worked on zooplankton further north in the Gulf of Maine.