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Logic loving professor enters Hall |
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Saturday, 10 February 2007 |
By KRISTIN REICHARDT
Staff Writer
As a professor of neurobiology and physiology at the University of California for more than three decades, one Wapakoneta native has traveled far in distance and academic achievement from her beginnings in a one-room schoolhouse in Fryburg.
Dorothy (Schumann) Woolley is quick to point out that her 1947 graduating class from Blume High School is famous because Neil Armstrong was a member, but she hesitates to give herself credit for her own impact in neurobiology and physiology. She presented her findings on the national and international levels and became published multiple times.
Woolley, 78, was born Feb. 2, 1929, on her parents’ 80-acre farm that stretched to Fryburg. Beginning the first grade in 1935 in a one-room schoolhouse that accommodated 20 students for all eight grades, she said her parents placed a strong emphasis on education.
“It was very hard for them to get an advanced education, so I think that had to have an influence,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday from her California home.
After graduating from Blume High School, where she played the clarinet in the marching band and the violin in the school orchestra, Woolley attended Bowling Green State University. She began her undergraduate career in 1947 pursuing a major in music education . She graduated magna cum laude in 1950 with bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biology.
“The interesting thing is, I started out in music but then I was only mediocre in music,” Woolley said. “In the meantime, I was getting A’s in chemistry and math and stuff like that, so I switched.”
Woolley said science appealed to her because it is “beautifully logical,” and she found the idea of scientists making medical and other advances amazing.
“I also had some teachers who really explained physical things so well,” Woolley said. “They just developed the concept step-by-step so you could understand.
“I had enough really good ones that I was inspired by how well they explained things and taught things,” she added.
Though her initial desire was to teach high school music, Woolley said as she pursued higher education her goals became higher — teaching high school after her bachelor’s degree, teaching college after earning her master’s degree, and by the time she began work on her doctorate degree she wanted to focus on research.
Woolley found something else in college she wanted in her life — her husband, Robert J. Woolley.
The couple married in September of 1950 after their commencement. They have three children — Kenneth Woolley, Nikki Diane Efigenio and Randy Woolley — and four grandchildren.
Dorothy and Robert Woolley started their graduate studies at The Ohio State University after her husband returned in 1953 from serving in the Korean War as a cryptologist.
Dorothy Woolley earned a master’s degree in physiology in 1957, and soon after the couple moved their family to Berkeley, Calif., to accommodate Woolley’s new position as a clinical psychologist.
Dorothy Woolley said she chose to pursue advanced degrees in physiology because it is a cross between biology and chemistry.
“That is how our bodies work and our brains work, and you have to find that pretty interesting,” she said.
Woolley found the subject so interesting she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 with a doctorate degree in physiology, and began looking for a full-time faculty position at a college or university where she could teach and facilitate research.
While in retrospect, Dorothy Woolley said earning two graduate degrees in less than 10 years while serving as a full-time wife and mother as challenging. She said she and her husband simply did what they had to do to manage.
“You had to be really creative, and you didn’t want to take too heavy a load because you had so many things to do,” she said, “but at the time you just kind of did it. You did problem solving as the problems came up.”
While in her doctorate program, Dorothy Woolley published six papers based on her dissertation research on the effects of sex hormones on brain excitability, including the susceptibility to seizures in rats.
She presented her research at the national meetings of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the Western Pharmacology Society, the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, and the American Physiology Society.
She said perhaps the most exhilarating opportunity was presenting her research at the First International Congress of Endocrinology in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1960, at the Sixth International Congress of Neurology in Rome in 1961, and at the 22nd International Congress of Physiological Sciences in Leiden, Netherlands in 1962.
After staying at UC-Berkeley for a post-doctoral fellowship, Woolley accepted a full-time position in 1965 at the University of California at Davis, where she remained for the remainder of her career.
While at UC-Davis, Woolley wrote a proposal for and received a grant to research the physiological effects of environmental toxicants. While not trained specifically in environmental toxicants, she chose a current issue at the time and proposed studying the physiological effects of DDT, including those on brain electrical activity.
She said this led to years of research that produced important results as the field of environmental toxicants developed — and created opportunities for her.
Dorothy Woolley continued to travel — such as to Tokyo — to present her work, taught multiple college classes ranging from freshmen seminars to supervising graduate students’ research, and publish her findings. During one three-year period from 1969 to 1971, she published 11 papers.
She took the opportunity to participate in faculty committees, such as the Affirmative Action Committee, and said she considers herself fortunate she was able to be an instrumental part of seeing the status and numbers of women faculty members grow during her time as a professor.
Though she retired in 2004, Dorothy Woolley said she still has a few papers to write and is teaching a freshman-level seminar.
Woolley said she is fortunate to have taught the subjects she did at the level she did.
“It’s the research that makes you famous,” she said, “but it’s the courses you teach that are appreciated.”
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Last Updated ( Monday, 12 February 2007 )
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