Mary Sears (oceanographer)

Mary Sears
Portrait of Mary Sears
Born	(1905-07-18)July 18, 1905 Wayland, MA
Died	September 2, 1997(1997-09-02) (aged 92) Woods Hole, MA
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1943-1963.
Rank	Commander
Commands held	Oceanographic Unit of the Navy Hydrographic Office 1943-1946
Awards	Johannes Schmidt medal in 1946 for contributions to marine research and Navy oceanography during WWII.
Other work	co-founding editor of the journal Deep-Sea Research, founding editor of the journal Progress in Oceanography

Mary Sears (July 18, 1905 – September 2, 1997) was a Commander in the United States Naval Reserve and a leading oceanographer. Throughout her career, she was associated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

Few members of the staff have been more closely involved in the development of WHOI than was Sears. She was present for many of the early discussions organizing the Institution and acquiring its first ships, the 142-foot ketch Atlantis and 40-foot coastal vessel Asterias, and its first laboratory, later named the Bigelow Laboratory.

Following mostly summer appointments in the 1930s, she served on the scientific staff as a planktonologist from 1940 to 1963, when a new department structure was organized under Director Paul Fye and she was named a Senior Scientist in the Biology Department, a position she held until her retirement in 1970. She was named a Scientist Emeritus in 1978.

Sears was also a long-time Member of the Corporation, serving as Clerk of the Corporation from 1947 to 1973 and as Deputy Clerk from 1973 to 1975. She was named an Honorary Trustee and Honorary Member in 1976, rarely missing a Trustee/Corporation meeting.

Born in 1905 and raised in Wayland, Massachusetts, Sears graduated from The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts in 1923, and lived with the Beale family in Cambridge, Massachusetts while attending Radcliffe College, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1927, a master's degree in 1929 and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1933.

While a graduate student she worked at Harvard University with Henry Bigelow, a founder and the first Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She began working summers as a planktonologist in 1932, one of the first ten research assistants to be appointed to the staff at the Institution.