Albert D. Mead Papers (OF-1UF-M1)

Biographical/Historical Note

Albert Davis Mead (1869-1946), professor of biology and vice-president of Brown University, was born in Swanton, Vermont on April 15, 1869. His father was a teacher of Greek and Latin. Mead graduated from Middlebury College in 1890. He had little scientific background, but the summer after his graduation he went to Woods Hole to work at the new Marine Biological Laboratory. There he met Brown professor Hermon Carey Bumpus and came back to Brown with him to receive an A.M. degree in 1891. He went on to study at Clark University under C. O. Whitman, whom he followed to the University of Chicago in 1893. After earning his Ph.D. degree at Chicago in 1895, Mead returned to Brown as instructor in comparative anatomy. The next year he was appointed associate professor of embryology and neurology. In 1900 he was named professor of comparative anatomy and was named chairman of that department in 1901 on the resignation of Professor Hermon Carey Bumpus. In 1905, after the death of Professor Alpheus S. Packard, he became chairman of the reorganized Department of Biology and in 1908 his title was changed to professor of biology. Mead’s research was devoted to the study of the development of worms, clams, and lobsters. He did early experimental work in cytology on the behavior of the centrosomes in the annelid egg and developed a method of raising young lobsters through their early precarious life.