SDE-GWIS FELLOWSHIPS: How Did They Get Started
and Who Were Their Benefactors?
Why do we give fellowships with different people’s
names attached to them? Why are several given in some years, and only
one or two in other years? Have fellowships always been an activity
of GWIS? Who was Eloise Gerry, anyway?
Historical Background of the SDE Fellowships
It was the intention of the founders of Sigma
Delta Epsilon (1921) that our objective of helping women in science
include, when possible, financial assistance. Apparently the sum
of $50 was given, from funds collected from members, several times
in the early 1920’s, to women needing money to do research. Then
in 1926, the National Convention authorized the transfer of $100
from the General Fund to serve as the nucleus for a Fellowships Fund.
Almost a decade later, Volume 1, Number 1 of the Sigma Delta Epsilon
News, dated May 1935, describes the action taken at the most recent
convention, at which the Fellowships Fund was deposited in the First
National Bank of Ithaca, NY, with a trust document in the process
of review and approval: "When everything is settled and our funds
are in safe keeping it is the hope of your Committee that the various
chapters will come forward with generous contributions. We wish our
Fellowships Fund to grow as rapidly as possible so that we may be
able to use it for the purpose for which it was established." At
that time the fund consisted of $2,200 in cash and $550 in securities.
Early News describe the progress of the fund, and contain pleas for contributions. The stated goal was fifty cents per member per chapter, and in 1938 nine chapters had achieved that goal, raising money either by direct assessments, or by such means as selling books, plants, or baked goods. The fund stood at over $3,500 then. A committee began to meet to draw up recommendations for the selection and qualifications of recipients of the fellowships. In 1939 a Twentieth Birthday Fellowships Fund drive was started. This was not a separate fund, but a way of increasing the amount in the Fellowships Fund to a level ($5,000 minimum) that would allow a fellowship to be awarded in 1941. With a great deal of hard work that dream came true, and in 1941 the first $1,500 fellowship was awarded to Dr. Frances Dorris-Humm, who did her fellowship research at the Osborn Zoological Laboratory at Yale University. The results from her work, "The Growth and Migration of Cultured Melanophores from the Neural Crest When Grafted into the Embryo", were published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, Vol. 90, # 1, June 5, 1942, pp. 101–105. The second fellowship was awarded in 1943–44 to Dorothy Marie Ziegler, a doctoral student doing research on the changes in epidermal cells, comparing normal and malignant ones. By 1959, six further fellowships, of $1,000–$l,500 each, had been awarded at roughly two-year intervals.
At that time it was decided that infrequent, large fellowships were not as desirable as smaller but more certain awards. Therefore, the practice of giving $1,000 and $1,500 fellowships was discontinued, and the Fellowships Fund was given over to the new awards, called Grants-in-Aid. These were set at $500, and the policy was to award them preferably to women thirty-five years of age or older. The first one, awarded in 1961–62 went to Dr. Joy Burcham Phillips, whose interest was in pituitary function. Dr. Phillips, who was 43, was an excellent example of the recipient for whom the new awards were designed: "women who are already established in their professional fields but who lack adequate financial support for continuation or completion of a specific project. It was recognized that while we should encourage women to enter science, we should also consider means by which they might be encouraged to remain in science."
In 1970 Eloise Gerry (always pronounced as in "get", not as in "Gerald") of Beta Chapter (Madison, WI) died. She had been chairman of the Fellowships Awards Board in 1941 at the time the first fellowship was awarded. She left over $90,000 to be the principal for a new fellowships fund. It took a couple of years to organize the fund legally, and in 1975 the first three Eloise Gerry Fellowships were awarded.
The grant-in-aid stipends were increased from $500 to $750 in 1971, to bring them more in line with costs and needs. These awards were funded from two sources: income from invested funds, some of which date back to the 1930’s, and contributions received during the year from members and chapters who contributed to the Fellowships Fund. Roughly $5,000 of the principal in the Fellowships Fund is from the money that the early members worked so hard to accumulate in time for the Twentieth Birthday. Adele Lewis Grant was central to the earliest efforts, and therefore it is a policy that the first award each year is given in her memory and honor; the fact that her last name was Grant has led to much confusion when well-meaning people have thought they were correcting an error if they eliminated the word "Grant" from "Adele Lewis Grant Fellowship"!
The policy of giving large fellowships in the name of Eloise Gerry and small grants-in-aid from the Fellowships Fund has changed over the years. Now the principals of the two funds (Eloise Gerry and Fellowships) are more nearly equal, and the amounts they can give are therefore roughly commensurate. A third fund, from the bequest of Vessa Notchev, has been added, and a fourth, from annual lump-sum donations by long-time Alpha Chapter (Ithaca, NY) member Nell Mondy, was established in the 1990's and made its first award in 2002. In all of these funds, the invested principal remains untouched, generating income out of which the fellowships are paid each year.
The present cap on any fellowship awarded is $4,000; therefore, several fellowships can be given out of each fund’s income, which fluctuates from year to year depending on how the investments have fared. New contributions earmarked for fellowships are added to the Fellowships Fund; the chief exception to that is the annual contribution from the Hartley Corporation, a charitable foundation that in recent years has funded a fellowship each year. (The Eli Lilly Travel Awards are not part of this scheme. They are fully funded by the Eli Lilly Foundation; GWIS is simply one channel by which applicants are selected and recommended to that foundation.)
The criteria now in use for the fellowships application and approval policies were established in 1988. At that time we realized that we had strayed from the language of Eloise Gerry’s will, which stated that the fellowships funded by her bequest were to be for work in the biological and chemical sciences; women doing research in any scientific field (including biology and chemistry) may apply for an SDE Fellowship or a Vessa Notchev Fellowship. More information about the current application process and policies for these awards can be found on other parts of this web site (click here).
There have been other significant contributors to the Fellowships Fund over the years, mostly by bequests. For example, on the death of Anna L. Hoffman in 1974, Sigma Delta Epsilon received over $5,000 from her estate. In 1979, Laura C. Stewart gave $2,000 in memory of her sister, Sarah E. Stewart, and members of Omicron Chapter (Washington, DC), of which Laura Stewart was a member, made additional contributions in memory of Sarah Stewart. In 1985, Dr. Margery Carlson died on July 5, and her friend and travel companion, Kate Staley, died on December 15, both of them leaving generous bequests to the Fellowships Fund ($20,000 and $10,000, if memory serves). Former treasurer Margaret Hays died in 1987, bequeathing money for fellowships. Also in 1987, we received startling but wonderful news: Mabel Myers, devoted secretary of SDE for many years, who had died in 1978, had left us $30,000 for fellowships, and an additional $30,000 to be given to us on the death of her sister; however, her will did not have our current address, and we did not learn of the bequests until a persistent family friend pursued the matter and found us! Our own record-keeping in the early 1980s was a bit sketchy, unfortunately, but in 1988 we did a thorough housecleaning and overhaul of our fellowships procedures, and awarded the first fellowships in the names of Margery Carlson, Kate Staley, and Mabel Myers, as well as Adele Lewis Grant, Anna Hoffman, Sarah Stewart, and the Hartley Corporation.
The Vessa Notchev Fellowships were established in 1994, following the death of long-time Tau Chapter (San Diego, CA) member Vessa Notchev. The most recent fellowship being established reached a size at which it could make awards: past president and Alpha Chapter (Ithaca, NY) member Nell I. Mondy gave $10,000 annually, and when the accumulated donations reached $50,000 we began giving fellowships in her name from the fund’s income, starting in 2002.
Biographical sketches of these major benefactors:
Adele
Lewis Grant
Anna
Louise Hoffman
Sarah
Elizabeth Stewart
Mabel
A. Myers
Margery
Carlson
Kate
Staley
Margaret
B. Hays
Nell
I. Mondy
Vessa
Notchev
