Ethel Currie

Dr Ethel Dobbie Currie FRSE FGS FGSG (1899-1963) was a distinguished Scottish geologist.

Life and career

Ethel Dobbie Currie was born at 92 Seymour Street, Cathcart, Glasgow (moving to 81 Seymour Street soon after), on 4 December 1899 to James Ferguson Currie and Elizabeth Laughlan Allan. She was a pupil of Bellahouston Academy. She completed her BSc at University of Glasgow in 1920 and her PhD in 1923. She was also awarded a DSc in 1945.

Currie's primary research interest was in palaeontology. Her first publication was a joint paper with Professor Gregory on fossil sea-urchins. She led a study of Scottish Carboniferous goniatites.^[1]

In 1945 she became the first woman to be awarded the Neill Prize by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1949, she was one of the first women to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (along with Sheina Marshall).^[1] Her proposers were Sir Edward Battersby Bailey, John Weir, Murray Macgregor, Sir Arthur Elijah Trueman, George W Tyrell, and Thomas Neville George.^[2]

Her contributions were acknowledged by the Geological Society of London and she was awarded its Wollaston Fund.^[3][4]

Professor John Walter Gregory invited her to assist with the care and arrangement of the geological collections in the Hunterian Museum after her graduation. She worked as assistant curator of the Museum until she retired in September 1962.

She died in Glasgow on 24 March 1963.^[5]

Publications

Ethel Currie published three books^[6]

• Jurassic and Eocene Echinoidea from Somaliland (Papers from the Geological department. Glasgow University) (1927)
• Note on rocks from the Sahara collected by Captain D.R.G. Cameron (Papers from the Geological department. Glasgow (1931)
• The vertebrate fossils from the glacial and associated post-glacial beds of Scotland in the Hunterian museum (1928) jointly with J. W. Currie

References