Arthur Shipley

Who was Arthur Shipley?

Sir Arthur Everett Shipley GBE FRS was an English zoologist and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

Shipley was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, brought up in Datchet, Buckinghamshire, and educated at University College School. He enrolled at St Bartholomew's Hospital as a medical student in 1879, but in the following year transferred to Christ's College, Cambridge to read natural sciences, specialising in zoology.

Shipley particularly specialised in the study of parasitic worms, publishing nearly fifty papers on them and leading to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1904. He stayed at Cambridge after graduation, being appointed university demonstrator in comparative anatomy in 1886, lecturer in the advanced morphology of the Invertebrata in 1894, and reader in zoology in 1908. He was elected a fellow of Christ's College in 1887 and became college tutor in natural sciences in 1892. In 1891 he was appointed secretary to Cambridge's Museums and Lecture Rooms Syndicate, which effectively put him in charge of all university laboratories and museums.