Students Commission Portrait of Biologist E. E. Just | UChicago Medicine

Editor's note, Feb. 2019: The portrait of E.E. Just is now complete and hanging in Erman Hall on the UChicago campus. The portrait was commissioned by a group of students from the University's Biological Sciences Division.

Ernest Everett Just, PhD, spent only three academic quarters on the University of Chicago campus. A professor at Howard University and a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, he was pursuing his PhD in zoology in absentia and needed to fulfill the residency requirement.

Despite his brief physical presence on campus, the research he conducted for his dissertation on the fertilization of marine worms – including a key discovery about cell cleavage – made a lasting contribution to the body of knowledge in embryology.

More than 100 years later, a group of Biological Sciences Division (BSD) graduate students formed the E.E. Just Working Group to promote his achievements and legacy, including the challenges Just faced as an African American scientist in the early 20th century. Read more of the article here.

Source: Pioneering biologist Ernest Everett Just – UChicago Medicine