In 1888, Emily Lovira Gregory was appointed to the faculty position of teaching fellow in the Department of Biology, making her the first female member of the faculty at Penn.

Born on Dec. 31, 1841, in Portage, N.Y., Gregory was a schoolteacher until the age of 35, when she enrolled at Cornell University.

Upon receiving her bachelor’s degree in literature in 1881 at age 39, she earned her Ph.D. in botany in 1886 from the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She was the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in botany, and one of the first to receive it in the sciences.

Gregory held temporary positions at Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe colleges before she was hired as a teaching fellow at Penn. She stayed at the University for a year, and then left for Barnard College in New York City, where she was appointed a lecturer on the anatomy and physiology of plants.

At Barnard, which had a partnership with Columbia University (which did not admit women), Gregory taught all botany students, supervised the laboratory, supported graduate students and laboratory assistants (who she paid with her own funds), and developed a series of botany courses.

Feeling overwhelmed, underpaid, and underappreciated, Gregory sent Columbia President Seth Low a letter in the spring of 1894 protesting her low pay and her status as a “lecturer” in botany. The title, she said, was “anything but my real function.”

Low eventually gave Gregory her just due and approved her promotion to a full professor of botany at Barnard in 1895. She was the first woman at the college to earn the rank of full professor.

Gregory passed away in 1897 at age 56, after a brief illness. Penn’s Gregory College House is named in her honor.

For more information on this and other historical events at Penn, visit the University Archives website.