Anna Coble


Anna Jane Coble-Mullen was an American biophysicist. She was the first black woman to earn a doctorate in biophysics, and the first black woman to be hired at Howard University.

Education

Coble was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she became interested in mathematics and physics. Her father was a teacher at St. Augustine's University. Coble studied mathematics at Howard University, earning a bachelor's in 1958 and a master's in 1961. After graduating she taught physics at North Carolina A&T State University for four years. Coble moved to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for her postgraduate studies, where she became an advocate for minority students and women. She completed her PhD in 1973 under the supervision of Floyd Dunn. She spent two years at Washington University in St. Louis studying the impact of high-intensity ultrasound on frogs.

Research and career

Coble moved back to Howard University, where she was the first black woman to be hired to the faculty. She spent an entire summer finding houses for 200 black graduate students, forfeiting her own research. During her time at Howard University there was a 30 - 40% cut to federal research grants. She was part of the Writing Across the Curriculum faculty. She was eventually promoted to Associate Professor.
She was part of the formation of the National Society of Black Physicists. She served on the board of the Ionia Whipper Home, a shelter for neglected teenage girls. She developed educational resources for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council.
She worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Association of Physics Teachers to support underrepresented groups in science. One project, the AAAS Black Church Project, took hands-on science to young people in the Washington Area. She passed away in 2009.