Agnes Fay Morgan

Agnes Fay Morgan (May 4, 1884 – July 20, 1968) was an American chemist and academic. She was the longtime chair of the home economics program at the University of California. Her program was strongly grounded in science, and students admitted into the program were required to have a level of science education that was not typical of home economics programs at the time. Morgan was one of the earliest married female college professors in the United States.

A graduate of the University of Chicago, Morgan held brief teaching appointments at smaller schools before earning a doctorate and taking the position at Berkeley. Morgan's lab conducted significant research into the nutritional composition of foods and the biochemistry of vitamins, especially pantothenic acid (vitamin B₅). Her work correlated decreasing bone density with increasing age and connected serum cholesterol levels with dietary fat intake. Her work also focused on the influence of storage and heat processing on food values.

Morgan remained associated with Berkeley for more than 50 years, and though she retired in 1954, she was active in her field until just before her death. She received the Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society and the Borden Research Award from the Borden Company Foundation. At Berkeley, the campus nutrition laboratory is named in her honor. Iota Sigma Pi, an American chemistry honor society, presents the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award to outstanding women in the field.

Agnes Fay was born in 1884 in Peoria, Illinois. Her parents were Patrick Fay and his second wife, the former Mary Dooley. Patrick and Mary Fay had come from Galway, Ireland. He was a manual laborer and then a builder. Agnes Fay was the third of the family's four children. A graduate of Peoria High School, Fay received a full college scholarship from a local donor. She went to Vassar College for a short time before transferring to the University of Chicago.

Fay enrolled at the University of Chicago as a physics major, but she changed her major to chemistry after taking a course in that subject from Julius Stieglitz. He was an influential chemist who became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and president of the American Chemical Society. Fay completed a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in chemistry in 1904 and 1905, respectively. For about a year, Fay was a college chemistry instructor, though there are conflicting sources as to the name of the college.

While teaching at the University of Montana in 1907–08, Fay married Arthur I. Morgan, who was a senior football player at the university. Though Fay had been Morgan's chemistry teacher, Morgan was four years older than Fay, having enrolled at Montana after military service in the Spanish–American War. Arthur Morgan became the headmaster of a boys' school and later worked for the Sperry Flour Company, becoming its vice president.

After teaching at the University of Washington from 1910 to 1912, Morgan completed a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago in 1914. Stieglitz supervised her dissertation. She may have been the only married woman to have received a Ph.D. in chemistry in the first few years of the 20th century. Married women were not generally welcome on university faculties (female professors were usually expected to resign when they married), but Stieglitz agreed to write a recommendation letter for Morgan for a position at the University of Illinois. Stieglitz noted in his letter that the university should overlook Morgan's marital status because her husband was ill at the time.

It is not known whether the University of Illinois extended an offer to Morgan, but in any case, she interviewed for a faculty position at Berkeley in the Department of Home Economics. She had an interview scheduled with the college's dean, but he sent his wife and his teenage daughter to conduct it. She accepted the position, which paid $1,800; male faculty members at the university were paid $2,400 with a doctorate and $1,800 without one. When Morgan arrived at Berkeley, she found that she had to teach courses in nutrition and dietetics. In 1915, Morgan became a faculty member in the Nutrition department at the University of California at Berkeley. Despite her chemistry background, she characterized dietetics as "a subject I knew nothing about and nobody else knew much about at that time." She said that she had to research the curriculum "mostly out of German medical journals."