The Carpenter-Rasch Award
Anna-Mary Carpenter, Ph.D., M.D. had a long record of service to the Histochemical Society, serving as Councilor, Officer, and President of the Society (1981). Anna-Mary received many awards including the Pioneers Award of the Histochemical Society in 1988 to recognize outstanding contributions and leadership in the field of histochemistry. While working with Ellen Rasch, she was instrumental in guiding the Histochemical Society through difficult financial times during the 1970s.
Anna-Mary received her B.A. from Geneva College in 1936, her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1940, and her M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1958. Her scientific career started in 1938 at the University of Pittsburgh where she was a member of the Pathology Department. In 1954 she joined the Anatomy Department at the University of Minnesota. She became full professor in 1963 and remained until 1982, becoming professor emeritus. She also served as Professor of Pathology at Indiana University from 1980-87.
Anna-Mary was internationally recognized for innovations in the fields of quantitative morphology and stereology, particularly of pancreatic islets, and was the first to "section" the pancreas using computer simulation, and one of the first investigators to use computers to automate quantitative morphometric analysis. Perhaps her greatest achievements and personal satisfaction came from teaching. Anna-Mary trained several generations of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and over 5000 medical students. Her extraordinary teaching ability was the result of her profound knowledge and understanding of morphology.
Ellen M. Rasch, Ph.D., has been a mainstay of the Society from its founding in 1950. She has attended nearly every HCS annual meeting and served as Councilor and Officer over many years as well as served on numerous committees at different times. Ellen's stewardship of the Histochemical Society was particularly significant during the 1970's and early 1980's, when she worked closely with Anna-Mary Carpenter to overcome financial shortfalls that threatened the viability of the Society. Her unflagging enthusiasm for the goals of the Society has been a great inspiration for her colleagues and students attending the annual meetings of The Histochemical Society. Ellen possibly holds the record for the number of papers presented at meetings of the Histochemical Society over the years.
Ellen received her Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Chicago and remained as a post-doctoral fellow and research assistant in Zoology from 1951-1959. From 1962-1965 she was a Research Associate Professor in Biology at Marquette University, Associate Professor in 1965, and Professor of Biology in 1968. From 1975-1978 she held the Todd C. Wehr Distinguished Chair of Biophysics at Marquette before moving in late 1978 to her position as a Research Professor in the Department of Cellular Biophysics of the new College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University in northeast Tennessee, where she served as Interim Chair of the Dept. of Cellular Biophysics from 1986-1994, From 1994 to present she has been a Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, where she still maintains an active research program.
She has a general research interest in the development and application of procedures for cytochemical analysis of chromosome structure in a variety of plant and animal species. A major emphasis in her laboratory has been the mechanisms of meiosis and origins of polyploidy in naturally occurring clones of unisexual, livebearing fishes from northern Mexico. These studies involve field collection of specimens from the wild, breeding studies in the laboratory and identification of both wild-caught and laboratory-reared fish by standard morphologic criteria and electroctrophoretic analysis of muscle protein phenotypes. A major emphasis has been to evaluate the functional significance of interspecific hybridization, unisexuality and polyploidy in the evolutionary biology of these unusual fish. Current studies of the phenomenon of chromatin diminution during early cleavage stages of copepod embryogenesis are directed to determine the amounts and nature of the discarded heterochromatin in the freshwater copepod, Mesocyclops edax.
February 19th, 2003