Alice Carter Cook
Alice Carter Cook, born Alice Carter, was an American botanist, who in 1888 received from Syracuse University the first PhD in botany granted to a woman by any American university. Carter was born in New York City on to parents Samuel Thompson Carter and Alantha Carter. Her father was a clergyman of nearby Huntington, New York. She studied at Mount Holyoke Seminary before enrolling at Syracuse for her doctorate. She subsequently taught at Mount Holyoke for three years before attending Cornell University where she earned a second graduate degree, an M.S. in botany, in 1892. That same year she married fellow botanist Orator Fuller Cook, and later accompanied him on expeditions to Africa and the Canary Islands.
Cook was a colleague and fellow graduate student with Henrietta Hooker, and in addition to botanical publications contributed several articles to Popular Science Monthly and Ladies' Home Journal. Her collections of plants are deposited in the Smithsonian Institution and Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Cook also wrote an anthropological profile of native people of the Canary Islands, and later published poems, short stories, and two plays.
Cook had two sons and two daughters; her son Robert Carter Cook became a noted geneticist and demographer.
