Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Sitter in 1 portrait
Wrinch's academic life began at Girton College, Cambridge in 1913 as a scholar of mathematics and moral sciences. While a research fellow at the university in 1917, she attended Bertrand Russell's lectures, became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group and would later provide books to Russell during his imprisonment. In 1929, she became the first woman to receive a DSc from Oxford University and during the 1930s began to apply mathematical techniques to theoretical biology to better understand protein structure. Collaborating with others including Dorothy Hodgkin she presented the cyclol structure. Her findings were disputed by her contemporaries but her contribution to molecular biology remained significant.