Eigenmann, Rosa Smith (1858-1947), was a pioneering woman ichthyologist. Ichthyology is the study of fishes . Eigenmann had her first scientific paper published by the age of 22.
Rosa Smith was born in Monmouth, Illinois, on Oct. 7, 1858, the youngest of nine children. In 1876, her family moved to California. She attended business college in San Francisco but was more interested in the living world around her. Smith became the first woman member of the San Diego Society of Natural History and its first librarian and recording secretary. Her presentation on the blind goby fish at a meeting of the natural history society caught the attention of the American ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, the foremost expert on fishes at the time. He invited Smith to study at Indiana University , where he was a professor of natural history. She studied there from 1880 to 1882. At the university she met Carl H. Eigenmann, another of Jordan’s students. Rosa and Carl married in 1887. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to conduct research on South American freshwater fishes at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University . There, Rosa was also a student of cryptogamic botany (the study of spore-producing plants). In 1889, the Eigenmanns established a biological station in San Diego, where they studied fish of the region. In 1891, they returned to Indiana, where Carl became a professor of zoology and administrator at Indiana University.
Twenty of Rosa Eigenmann’s scientific papers were published. She also had published 15 more with her husband before retiring from research in 1893 to take care of her children. Eigenmann died in San Diego on Jan. 12, 1947.
