Igerna Sollas

Igerna Brünhilda Johnson Sollas (1877–1965), also known as Hilda Sollas, was a British zoologist and geologist, and lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge.She had wide interests, studying marine organisms, genetics, and palaeontology. She was a collaborator with Cambridge geneticist William Bateson. An alumna of Alexandra College, Dublin, she was recognized as a role model for women in higher education in Ireland and England.

Igerna Sollas was born 16 March 1877 in the town of Dawlish at Devon, the daughter of geologist William Johnson Sollas and his first wife Helen. She received an early education at Alexandra School and College in Dublin, and then attended Newnham College, Cambridge on a Gilchrist scholarship in 1897, where she took first class honours in both part I and part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos exam, completing a zoology degree in 1901. She held the position of lecturer in zoology at Newnham from 1903 to 1913, save for the period 1904 to 1906 when she was a Newnham college research fellow.

Her research included fossil mammals and invertebrates, the biology of sponges and sea squirts, and methods of separating minerals for chemical analysis. She published some papers on fossils in collaboration with her father. At Cambridge she was part of an active research group led by William Bateson, and she studied the genetics of colouration in guinea pigs and moth wings.

Later in life she became a practitioner of Christian Science and contributed articles to Christian Science journals. In moving to Christian Science she gave up animal experimentation, passing her guinea pig research to J. B. S. Haldane. Her scientific publications ceased after 1916, and she took up gardening and care of her father's house after his death in 1936.

Sollas died in November, 1965, aged 88. She is commemorated in the name Igernella, a genus of sponges named by zoologist Émile Topsent in 1905.