User:Hesslaw642/Frances Lawrance Parker

Frances Lawrance Parker (1906 – 2002) was an American geologist, chemist, and paleontologist who was a Marine geologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, a Shell Oil Company paleontologist, and a paleoceanographer whose specialty was research on oceanographic foraminifera.

Early Life and Education
Frances Lawrance Parker was born on march 28, 1906 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to parents Philip Stanley parker and Eleanor Payson Parker. In 1928, She received a Bachelor's degree for Vassar college in New York, And moved on to receive her Masters degree in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1930. During her time at MIT, Parker met her future research partner, Joseph Cushman, whom she would publish up to 16 scientific papers with. Instead of acquiring a Ph.D, Parker decided to work full time with Cushman, as she believed that her research would be more important than receiving another degree.

Career
Upon meeting Cushman in a course at the MIT, Parker became interested in his study of Foraminifera, and became his research assistant at the Cushman Laboratory in Sharon, Massachusetts. upon taking the U.S. Geological Survey examination, Parker was appointed assistant scientist at the laboratory, where she would work with students and other assistants. As Cushman's research assistant, Parker traveled with Cushman to Europe in 1932, where they examined specimens, visited museums, and visited fellow scientists conducting the same research. Parker visited places like Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. During her summers between 1936 and 1940, she would be participating in research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, along with fellow scientist Fred B. Phleger. Parker eventually split with Cushman in 1940. In the ten years when they were partners, they shared up to 16 scientific papers.

Parker took up a job as a secretary at Foxcroft, a girl's school in Middleburg Virginia. After working there for three years. she accepted a Job offer in 1943 to work as a paleontologist in the Shell oil company. Knowing the connection between the Petroleum industry and the nature of Foraminifera, she took the job and was appointed senior Paleontologist at the company in 1943. Three years later however, she was forced to leave due to a tuberculosis infection.

in 1947, fellow scientist Fred Phleger once again contacted Parker, this time with a job offer to work with Phleger at Amherst College, and to return to Woods Hole. Parker accepted the job, and alongside Phleger, undertook work on taxonomy of foraminifera. During that time, she published a series of studies on foraminifera from both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and did work on the micropaleontology of the Mediterranean Sea.

In 1950, Phleger decided to move west to California after accepting a job at The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in La Jolla. California. Parker followed, as she was offered the same position. Together, they established the Marine Foraminifera Laboratory at the institution. She worked at the institution for 20 years, rising in the ranks from a junior research geologist in 1952, to Research paleontologist II in July 1970. She retired from the institution in 1973, but continued working in the laboratory until 1983.

Research
Frances Parker in her early life was an outstanding micro paleontologist and pioneer of paleoceanography. She contributed significantly to the knowledge of not only benthic and planktonic Foraminifera but also to taxonomy and biogeographic and stratigraphic distributions, Besides spending time at the microscope, identifying and counting foraminiferal species, she also dedicated much attention on fossils, and most of her time was spent examining samples of faunal content.

However, her work became well recognized and as an underlying basis for modern paleoceanography, and as a purpose for the deep-sea expedition. Parker also spent her time studying the lineages in planktonic foraminifera for the Late Cenozoic and a recent classification of planktonic foraminifera, and demonstration of the warm-cold cycles in Mediterranean in connection to Albatross cores.

Parker spent a good amount of time working with Cushman on taxonomic nature and studied the occurrence of benthic species on shelves and margins in various regions of the world, which was in relation to scientist d'Orbigny’s previous studies. Her major specialization was on the Genus “Bulimina  in respect to the genera Buliminella and Robertina''.

Contributions and Awards
Parker made significant contributions to science in her line of work. Most of Parker’s first publications were in collaboration with Cushman for the Contributions of the Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research and a couple for “Journal of Paleontology”. Together they published around sixteen papers between the years 1930 and 1940. At the Woods Hole oceanographic institution, Parker pursued a wide range of topics such as taxonomy, stratigraphy, biogeography, ecology, sedimentology, and paleoenvironment; and many of her publications on benthic and planktonic foraminifera are to this day regarded as classics. Upon joining Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Parker founded the Marine Foraminifera Laboratory at Scripps with Fred B. Phleger. Parker published more than 30 papers as a sole author and as a contributor with Phleger and other SIO colleges and edited the Contributions from the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research from 1956-1963. Parker's research on planktonic foraminifera, which started in 1960, is considered especially important as she created a new high-level classification system based on the presence and absence of spines on planktonic foraminifera shells, down to the genus level. Her taxonomy is now widely accepted as the basis for all Cenozoic planktonic foraminifera classification. It is difficult to say which of Parker's contributions has had the greatest influence, but the 1962 paper on the taxonomy of planktonic foraminifera is a strong contender for this honor.

Parker was an honorary director and a fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research. She was honored as a pioneer in modern micropaleontology in 1981, when she received the Joseph A. Cushman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Foraminiferal Research. Aside from that, in 1976, the United States Geological Survey also named a bank on the Louisiana Shelf in the Gulf of Mexico “The Parker Bank” in her honor, near the Phleger Bank, which was named after her co-worker/co-author Fred Phleger.