Katherine Brehme Warren

Warren was born Katherine Suydam Brehme in New York City in 1909, to parents Almira and Franklin Brehme.[1] She graduated from Barnard College in 1930[2] and earned a doctorate in zoology from Columbia University.[3] She married fellow scientist fellow scientist Charles O. Warren in 1939.[4]

Brehme was a student of Calvin Bridges and after his death the Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Milislav Demerec pushed for Warren's appointment to complete some of Bridges's unfinished work.[5] The project was supported by a fellowship from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the completed work, The Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster (1944), became a classic in the field.[6] For decades "Bridges and Brehme" served as an essential reference for geneticists and later formed the backbone of subsequent scholarship and, ultimately, the online resource FlyBase.[7]

Warren served as the executive director of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology.[3] As Symposia editor from 1941-1958, she was responsible for manuscript preparation, proofreading, and indexing.[8] In addition to her serious editorial duties, she introduced a nonexistent scholar, J. C. Foothills of Tennessee Intermountain College, whose name was derived from her favorite expression of frustration: "Jesus Christ in the foothills!"[9]

Warren taught biology at Adelphi University, Hofstra University, Cornell University Medical College and Wellesley College. She later spent a decade as a grants administrator at the National Institutes of Health, retiring in 1971.[3]

Warren suspended her teaching career for several years after the birth of her children, but did not interrupt her work with the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia.[10] The couple divorced in 1961, with Warren retaining custody of her three teenage daughters.[11]