Helen Redfield

Who is Helen Redfield?

Helen Redfield, was an American geneticist. Redfield graduated from Rice University in 1920, followed by earning her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1921. While at Rice, she worked in the mathematics department. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1925 and that same year she became a National Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 1926 she married Jack Schultz, the couple would have two children. Redfield retained her maiden name upon her marriage. In 1929 she worked as a teaching fellow at New York University. Ten years later she worked as a geneticist in the Kirchoff Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Starting in 1942, during World War II, she worked as a lab scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory during the summer. From 1951 until 1961 she served as a research associate at the Institute for Cancer Research.

Redfield studied the genetics of drosophila. Like many women of the period, Redfield was unable to move beyond the role of "research associate" due to gendered discrimination of women's roles in science.