Performance Highlights Environmental Work of Early UC Female PhDs

While the University of Cincinnati is well-known for founding cooperative education, training the creator of Benadryl and having Neil Armstrong teach engineering, few know the fascinating stories of two of its earliest female PhDs: Annette and Lucy Braun. 

The story of the Cincinnati-born sisters, better known outside of their hometown thanks to their distinguished scientific careers, is the focus of a new one-woman play developed by Alice Jones of Eastern Kentucky University. It makes its Cincinnati debut at a free showing in Tangeman University Center’s Main Street Cinema at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 11.

In fields and forests around the city and across the country, the indefatigable sisters made history after earning their PhDs in Biology in 1911 and 1916. They both built internationally renowned careers in science and conservation.

In 1911, Annette Braun was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University; her sister Lucy followed in her doctoral footsteps five years later. The native Cincinnatians spent their entire academic lives at UC, majoring and then teaching in the Biological Sciences. 

Annette became a renowned entomologist while Lucy earned fame as one of the nation’s leading botanists and foremost ecologists. Together, they traversed more than 60,000 of miles of forests to capture a depth and breadth of specimens that remains, to this day, unrivaled. They also collected a lifetime’s worth of adventures avoiding bootleggers, venturing into hollers and discovering and documenting hundreds of species of plants and insects.  

Lucy’s seminal text on forests was groundbreaking in its geographic scale, which spanned more than 300 field sites in 17 states, as well as for the extraordinarily detailed descriptions of certain sties, including the plants and trees in what is now known as the Edge of Appalachia Preserve in Adams County, Ohio. While the Edge is the signature example of the Brauns’ research, conservation and biodiversity efforts, there are others as well. 

One example is a plot of land in Blue Ash still owned by the University that carries with it stories of meetings of the Blue Hydra Society, a group of UC Biology students the sisters helped found. The group evolved into the Cincinnati Wildflower Society, a group active to this day.

The sisters did much more than fieldwork. They spent decades working with undergraduate and graduate students in Biology, training new generations of PhDs focused on uncovering the mysteries of forest evolution and documenting the richness of biodiversity in areas from the East Coast to the West. Many of their students were young women, who, like the Brauns, were dedicated to building careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), generations before that term came into fashion. 

Jones of Eastern Kentucky University has been researching the Braun sisters and their legacy in the forests of Kentucky, in particular. Her performance is the culmination of that work and focuses on the sisters’ journeys, their struggles and the passion that drove them ever forward in their research and conservation efforts.

This free debut performance is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences partnership with the Cincinnati Museum Center, the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences and UC’s Blue Hydra Society (the Botany Club), which counts the Brauns among its earliest members.