Alice Miles Woodruff


Alice Miles Woodruff was an American virologist. She developed a method for growing fowlpox outside of a live chicken alongside Ernest William Goodpasture. Her research greatly facilitated the rapid advancement in the study of viruses.

Education and career

Alice Woodruff obtained a MS in 1924 and a PhD in 1925 from Yale University. She worked as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University from 1927 until 1931. While working with her husband and Goodpasture, she conducted studies in the "nature, infectivity, and purification of fowl-pox virus, and the character of the changes it induced on experimental infection of fowls," which became the forerunner in the cultivation of viruses.

Personal life

She married Charles Woodruff on 25 August 1927 and had three children with him: Alice, Mary Jean, and Charles Eugene.