Agassiz, Louis (1807-1873)

Louis-Jean-Rudolphe Agassiz was born in Switzerland in 1807, where he developed a love of natural history as a small boy. He received his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in 1930, and after spending a year working in Paris studying comparative anatomy under Cuvier, in 1832 he was awarded a professorship of natural history at the Lyceum of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Whilst at Neuchâtel he took up the study of glaciers as a sideline, becoming known as the "father of glaciology."

After emigrating to America he became a professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard in 1848, taking up a a position created especially for him, and in 1859 he founded the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1863 he was a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences and became a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He was also a member of the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences.

Agassiz died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in December 1873, less than a year after he founded the Anderson School of Natural History. The Anderson School did not survive long after his death, but was seen as a precursor to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.