author
Igerna Brünhilda Johnson Sollas
1877–1965
A pioneering British scientist who moved easily between zoology, geology, and palaeontology, she belonged to the first generation of women to study geology at Cambridge. Her career reflects both wide scientific curiosity and the quiet determination it took for women to enter academic life at the turn of the 20th century.
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About the author
Igerna Brünhilda Johnson Sollas, also known as Hilda Sollas, was born in Dawlish, Devon, in 1877. She studied at Alexandra College in Dublin and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she became one of the first eight women to be taught geology at the university.
Her interests ranged widely across the natural sciences. She worked in zoology, palaeontology, and geology, studied marine organisms and fossils, and was associated with Newnham College as a lecturer. Sources on her life also note her collaboration with the geneticist William Bateson, showing how comfortably she moved across different scientific fields.
Sollas died in 1965, but she remains notable as an early woman scientist who built a serious academic career at a time when such paths were still difficult to access. Her story is a reminder of how much early modern science depended on people willing to cross boundaries, ask broad questions, and persist in spaces that were not yet designed for them.