Margaret Merrell

Margaret Merrell (December 3, 1900 – 21, 1995) was an American biostatistician who taught at Johns Hopkins University for many years and became the first female full professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is known for her research with Lowell Reed on the construction of life tables. She also observed that, for longitudinal data on individuals, fitting a curve to each individual and then averaging the parameters describing the curve will typically give different results than averaging the data values of the individuals and fitting a single curve to the averaged data.

Biography

Merrell was born in La Grange, Illinois. She entered Wellesley College as an honor student from Framingham High School, and became vice-president of the Wellesley mathematics club. She graduated in 1922, and took a position as a schoolteacher in Baltimore. She joined Johns Hopkins as an instructor and graduate student in 1925, and completed her Sc.D. there in 1930. Her dissertation, supervised by Lowell Reed, was The Relationship of Individual Growth to Average Growth.

After completing her doctorate, Merrell remained on the Johns Hopkins faculty. During World War II, she consulted with the U.S. Army on treatments for sexually transmitted diseases and for motion sickness. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, she "reportedly carried most of her department's teaching load" and was described as "the intellectual power behind the throne" of the department. She was promoted to full professor in 1957, served as acting chair of biostatistics in 1957–1958, and retired in 1959.

She died in 1995, in a nursing home in Berlin, New Hampshire.

Honors and awards

Merrell was honored by the American Statistical Association in 1951 by election as a fellow of the association.

The Helen Abbey and Margaret Merrell Professorship in Biostatistics Education at Johns Hopkins University is named after her and Professor Helen Abbey.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Cook County, Illinois, Birth Certificates Index, 1871-1922
  2. 1 2 3 "Margaret Merrell, 95, of N.H.; retired biostatistics professor", The Boston Globe, Boston, MA, December 25, 1995, archived from the original on November 7, 2017 – via HighBeam Research
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Margaret Merrell, Faculty Member: 1925–1959", Biostatistics History, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, retrieved 2017-11-06
  4. 1 2 3 Thomas, Karen Kruse (2016), Health and Humanity: A History of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 1935–1985, JHU Press, p. 102 (elect.ed.), ISBN 9781421421094
  5. ↑ Namboodiri, Krishnan; Suchindran, C. M. (2013), "The Reed–Merrell Method", Life Table Techniques and Their Applications, Studies in Population, Academic Press, pp. 22–23, ISBN 9781483288888
  6. ↑ Tanner, James Mourilyan (1981), A History of the Study of Human Growth, Cambridge University Press, p. 342, ISBN 9780521224888
  7. ↑ "Honorable Mention Class of 1922", The Wellesley Alumnae Quarterly, 4 (2): 125, January 1920
  8. ↑ Wheeler, Mary (November–December 1922), "The Mathematics Club of Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.", American Mathematical Monthly: 419, doi:10.1080/00029890.1922.11986185
  9. 1 2 "Margaret Merrell, ScD", Heroes of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, retrieved 2017-11-06
  10. ↑ Margaret Merrell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  11. ↑ Rossiter, Margaret W. (1984), Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, JHU Press, p. 207, ISBN 9780801825095
  12. ↑ ASA Fellows list, American Statistical Association, archived from the original on 2017-12-01, retrieved 2017-11-03
  13. ↑ "Helen Abbey and Margaret Merrell Professorship in Biostatistics Education". Johns Hopkins University. 23 June 2016. Retrieved 15 March 2020.