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Sigurd Olsen

Sigurd Otto Maglegaard Olsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1908. Economic pressures forced him to leave school at 15 and he began a career in the Department of Social Welfare in Copenhagen. Unable to pursue a formal university education, he worked in his spare hours in botany and biology, specializing in limnology. The University of Copenhagen recognized his contributions to the field in 1939, awarding him the gold medal in botany for his major study of charophytes published through the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. He continued to be affiliated with the University of Copenhagen until he married Ingrith Deyrup and emigrated to the United States in 1963.

For the next seven years, he worked as a biologist and research assistant professor in the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington. After his retirement in 1970, he devoted himself full time to biological studies and photography, developing techniques for capturing subjects too large for photomicrography, but too small for standard photography. Much of his scientific work was carried out at Bear Lake on the Kitsap Peninsula and focused on the ground cone Boschniakia hookeri. He died in 1980.

Ingrith Deyrup-Olsen

Ingrith Deyrup-Olsen was born in 1919 in Englewood, N.J. She earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from Barnard College (1940), a doctorate in physiology from Columbia (1944), and joined the UW faculty as a professor of zoology in 1964. Popularly known as the "slug lady," Deyrup-Olsen studied mucus secrection, in particular how slugs use mucus in transportation. She created the UW's Master of Science for Biology Teachers program to improve the teaching of science in secondary schools. She was also a founder of the UW's Women Studies Program. In 1988, Ingrith received the UW's Distinguished Teaching Award. She retired in 1990 and died in 2004.