Google celebrates marine biologist María de los Ángeles Alvariño González with latest Doodle
By Theresa Waldrop
Google honored María de los Ángeles Alvariño González with a Doodle on Sunday, the 105th birthday of the marine research biologist “widely regarded as one of the most important Spanish scientists of all time,” Google said.
Alvariño discovered 22 new species of zooplankton and published more than 100 scientific papers, according to Google and biographies of the scientist.
The Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) appointed her as a marine biologist in 1952, even though only men were accepted at the institute at the time, because of her impressive work at university, Google said.
Born in Serntes on the Spanish coast, Alvariño developed a love for natural history early, encouraged by her parents to read her doctor father’s books on zoology, according to Encyclopedia of World Biography.
Her father didn’t support her wish to become a doctor herself, though, and Ángeles Alvariño continued studying natural sciences at the University of Madrid, according to the biography.
A British Council Fellowship led her to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth, England, to study zooplankton, including jellyfish.
That fellowship “resulted in her becoming the first woman to work as a scientist aboard a British research vessel,” Google wrote.
She continued her research with a Fulbright Fellowship in the United States and became an American citizen in 1966, according to the encyclopedia biography.
“Today, Ángeles Alvariño is the only Spanish scientist of 1,000 in the ‘Encyclopedia of World Scientists,'” Google wrote, “and a modern research vessel in IEO’s fleet bears her name.”
Alvariño died in 2005.
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