Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
Evelyn Fox Keller was the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who had immigrated to the United States. She is the youngest of three brothers and the only woman. She was born in Jackson Heights (Queens) and grew up in Woodside. She began her primary education in a New York public school. At the age of 11, he decided to be a psychoanalyst, after his brother Frances' explanation about the subconscious. However, when he finished high school, his older brother Frances managed to convince him to enter the sciences, which he did at Queens College. . During her freshman year, her Calculus teacher suggested she move on to Physics. At the end of that academic year, Ella Keller planned to transfer to a college that would require him to live outside of her parents' home. Also taking into account the transfer costs and the possibility of receiving a scholarship, under the advice of her older brother, she chose to transfer to Brandeis University, of Jewish origin. Finally, Keller graduated with a degree in Physics from Brandeis University in June 1957.
After obtaining a scholarship from the National Science Foundation the same year, he continued his studies in Theoretical Physics at Harvard University. She received her master's degree in 1959 from Radcliffe College, an institute belonging to Harvard University that was aimed only at women. Her Ph.D. She received it in the name of Harvard in June 1963, with a thesis that combined Theoretical Physics and Molecular Biology, whose advisor was Matthew Meselson. That same year, she began as a nighttime professor at New York University.
After completing his doctoral studies and before beginning his thesis process, Fox took a period of family vacation in Cold Springs Harbor (New York) in the summer of 1960. There, he became interested in molecular biology during a visit to the Long Island Biological Laboratories. His later work focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology, as well as science, technology, and gender studies.
He was a professor at New York University, Cornell University Medical College, University of Maryland, Northeastern University, University of California – Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Germany), École normale supérieure, University of Minnesota , Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Smith College. She was professor emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a professor at New York University and in the rhetoric department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Personal experience as a woman in science
Part of her interest in becoming a Physicist was wanting to break the stereotype that women are not good at science. However, by showing interest in theoretical physics during her doctoral studies at Harvard, she was known within the student environment as an “anomaly.” As had happened since the 1963th century in the world, she was a victim of harassment by her teachers through sexist humor, and rumors about alleged plagiarism. This occurred within the general principle at Harvard that women could not complete their studies in Theoretical Physics. Despite this, Evelyn Fox finished her studies in two years. Due to the harassment received from her, she felt persecuted by her fellow students and the male faculty, so she took some time off with her family. After that, she returned to Harvard to graduate in XNUMX.
Thinking about science and gender
Evelyn Fox Keller has documented how the male-identified public sphere and the female-identified private sphere have structured thinking in two areas of evolutionary biology: population genetics and mathematical ecology. Her concern is to show how the selection process that occurs in the context of discovery limits what we come to know. Keller argues that the assumption that the atomistic individual is the fundamental unit in nature has led population geneticists to omit sexual reproduction from their models. Although the critique of misplaced individualism is nothing new, the gender dynamics that Keller reveals are. According to Keller, geneticists treat reproduction as if individuals reproduced themselves, effectively sidestepping the complexities of sexual difference, the contingencies of mating, and fertilization. She compares the atomistic individual of biologists with the heuristic individual represented by mainstream Western political and economic theorists. Keller further argues that biologists use values attributed to the public sphere of Western culture to describe relationships between individuals (while values generally attributed to the private sphere to describe relationships are confused with the interior of an individual organism).
Source: Wikipedia