99-year-old Alumna Celebrates UMBS as Historic Advocate for Women in Science

Amid an era of challenges that included war, race segregation, and the marginalization of women in science, Hurst found a welcoming and supportive community at the U-M Biological Station that led the avid gardener and nature-lover on a path to a remarkable career in medical education.

“The people I met at the Biological Station changed my life. It's kind of a place where women were expected in science, and then you go out in your career in the real world, a different world,” Hurst said. “It was a good education and exposure for me — strong ground. There were women there and not this negative kind of thing that you would see other places. It was a good background for moving on to places in the broader scientific community where women weren’t so accepted.”

She earned her bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University in 1948, and she earned her master’s degree in botany in 1949 from U-M and her Ph.D. in 1956 from the U-M Medical School.

Hurst, a professor emeritus of biology, retired in 1997 from Eastern Michigan University after teaching gross anatomy and neuroanatomy to occupational therapy students for 24 years.

“Edie is a dear friend and a living treasure to all of us at the University of Michigan Biological Station,” said Karie Slavik, associate director of UMBS, the research and teaching campus in Pellston comprised of more than 10,000-forested acres surrounded by rivers, lakes and bogs. “Her insight is invaluable, and her stories give a personal perspective to the rich history of UMBS.”

Early Experiences

The U-M Biological Station was founded in Pellston along Douglas Lake in 1909 — the same year the Detroit Tigers played the longest scoreless game in American League history against the Washington Senators ending in an 18-inning, 0-0 tie, and 17 years before Hurst was born.

About 20 miles south of the Mackinac Bridge, the campus was established on land acquired from lumber barons after virtually all the trees had been cleared. Student and faculty researchers studied the flora and fauna of a landscape ravaged by catastrophic logging and subsequent fires, allowing them to learn first-hand how land exploitation impacted the natural environment.

More than 250 miles south of UMBS, Hurst was born in Detroit in 1926. MacLennan was her maiden name. Her dad worked at a Chevrolet factory. She spent her childhood summers at a farm in Ontario, Canada, on Lake Huron.

The summer after her freshman year at Wayne State University — nearing the end of World War II when “tuition at Wayne was $50 a semester” — marked Hurst’s first of half a dozen summers at the University of Michigan Biological Station as both a student and later a researcher.

“It was 1945. The war was on. It was almost finished. I remember my senior year in high school some boys got drafted and then it was soon over,” Hurst said.

“At the Bio Station, there were more women than men taking those classes because the guys weren’t back from the war. There were still some men taking classes though.”

She found out about the opportunity to take field courses and earn college credits at UMBS from her zoology course instructor at Wayne State. Hurst said Charles Creaser, a professor and the chair of the Department of Biology at Wayne State at the time, also taught courses at UMBS each summer and recommended she apply.

Creaser was an expert on the taxonomy of lampreys and the accumulation of radioactive iodine in vertebrates.

“That first summer I took a course taught by Creaser that combined herpetology and mammalogy. I also took entomology with Herbert Hungerford who came from the University of Kansas,” Hurst said. “This was my first taste of my personal love of the outdoors aligning with what my professional life could be. I felt comfortable. I felt at home.”

(Less than 10 years later, Hungerford became the namesake of the insect brychius hungerfordi, Hungerford’s crawling water beetle. In July 1952 a teaching assistant at UMBS named Paul Spangler discovered the little water beetles in the East Branch of the Maple River, near campus. Spangler named it for his instructor. A glacial holdover, Hungerford’s crawling water beetles are endangered with a small geographic range in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula.)

“At first, it was a little scary with all these people who knew so much, but I was familiar with the outdoors and really enjoyed it,” Hurst said. “At 19 years old, I was so young and new. I stayed in a student cabin along the lake. I didn’t even drive a car, let alone a boat.”

Hurst especially loved the square dances on Saturday nights and the field trips the classes would take together — two activities that are still alive today.

“I went to a bog that first year,” Hurst said. “The bogs were fun. It’s a place you wouldn’t want to go by yourself. When you start sinking down, you need someone to help you get up.”

(Kelly Koshorek, a UMBS alumna from 2024, concurs. Read the “wild” story and watch the video of Kelly’s Mud Lake Bog experience.)

Classes didn’t travel far 80 years ago, Hurst said, partly because of transportation.

“They had trucks with seating in the back that was open a lot of the time,” Hurst said. “I remember sitting in the back of the truck. They put planks on both sides to serve as seats, which was fine. You could see a lot as you were in the open truck.”

Eventually buses were employed and that later transitioned to a fleet of vans, which UMBS uses currently.

Hurst said the technology was limited too during her undergraduate days at UMBS, requiring self-reliance and caution. The absence of modern communication equipment and networks made it more vulnerable to go deep into remote areas.

 “We didn’t have the flexibility that people now have for moving around. We had to be much more careful,” Hurst said.

“We used paper maps. The only telephones were on a wall. So when you got lost, you didn’t have a phone to carry around and call for help or find your location,” Hurst said. “You had to be careful you didn’t wander away because you couldn’t contact anybody. If you were alone, you followed the trail along the lake. You didn’t wander off of it, even if a couple people were together.”

The second summer Hurst got into birding through the ornithology class — “I went into it knowing the difference between a crow and an oriole” — and also took systemic botany taught by William Campbell Steere, a professor of botany at U-M and a world renown bryologist especially concerned with mosses of the arctic. Steere later went on to serve as director of the New York Botanical Garden.

A pioneering U-M botanist named Dr. Elzada Clover also taught systemic botany at the research and teaching campus in northern Michigan throughout her career. In 1938, Clover and Lois Jotter, Clover’s graduate student assistant, took a historic boat trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to record the plants that lived along what was then the most dangerous river in the world.

Clover and Jotter compiled a comprehensive plant list that included four new cacti species and would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystems. The collection formed the basis for what is now Matthaei Botanical Garden’s desert house collection in Ann Arbor.

“I didn't know what happened on the river when I was a graduate student in Ann Arbor taking a class she taught. It was a seminar focused on succulents,” Hurst said. “She was kind and friendly and intelligent, but she didn't push her accomplishments on other people. Elzada was a good role model for women in science. She even served on my Ph.D. committee.”

While at UMBS, Hurst formed an enduring friendship with a fellow female student at U-M named Sophia Holley Ellis, the first Black student to study at UMBS.

“One summer we roomed together. There were three people in a cabin,” Hurst said. “At the Bio Station, no one thought anything about it. No one got upset. But later when we went back to Ann Arbor and then after that moved to Detroit after college to teach science at elementary and junior high schools, if we went anyplace to eat we would have to check ahead of time to see if they would let Holley in. Where we roomed together, I had to rent the apartment. The landlord wouldn’t rent it to Holley.”

From U-M, Ellis earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and German in 1949, a master’s degree in botany in 1950 and a master’s degree in German in 1964.  

The first African American student to study at the U-M Biological Station went on to teach biology and German in Detroit public schools for 56 years before retiring in 2006. She received several awards over the years, including the Phyllis Layton Perry Educator of the Year in 2006, awarded by the U.S. State Department. She died in 2022 at the age of 95.

Lasting Influence

After Hurst finished her senior year at Wayne State, she took a class at UMBS with Dr. Frederick Sparrow about aquatic flowering plants. Sparrow, a botany professor at U-M, was an expert on freshwater and marine fungi and would later become director of UMBS from 1968 to 1971.

“He recognized my work in botany and encouraged me to go to the University of Michigan as a graduate student,” Hurst said. “I remember Sparrow asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’ I said, ‘Well, I've got a teaching certificate. I'll teach part time.’ He wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted me to take classes at U-M. But I said, ‘I can’t. I don’t have the money to do that.’”

What happened next changed her life: Sparrow went directly to Frieda Blanchard, a biologist who was married to UMBS instructor and herpetologist Frank Blanchard, and they agreed something had to be done to help.

Hurst said Frieda Blanchard, who was associate director of the botanical gardens in Ann Arbor at the time, approached her at UMBS before the summer field season ended in Pellston and offered her a room at the family’s home in Ann Arbor. Instead of paying rent, Hurst would clean the upstairs — “meaning the bathroom” — once a week.

“She also got me a job working for her part-time at the botanical gardens,” Hurst said. “That’s how I got here to Ann Arbor to take classes and earn my master’s degree. Sparrow and Mrs. Blanchard made a plan at UMBS.”

After getting her master’s degree and teaching science at a junior high in Detroit for a year, Hurst decided to go back to school for her Ph.D.

But she didn’t continue down the botany route.

“Somebody recommended I go talk to Dr. Crosby, the first woman professor in the Medical School at Michigan. She’s really nice and good in her area,” Hurst said.

And just like that, Hurst pivoted to neuroanatomy under the mentorship of world-renowned neuroanatomist Dr. Elizabeth Caroline Crosby, who died in 1983 at age 94. Crosby’s research greatly expanded the available knowledge of the nervous system of vertebrates.

In a full-circle connection, Crosby’s legacy helped families this year at UMBS, especially early-career field scientists. Forty-two years after Crosby’s death, the ADVANCE Elizabeth Caroline Crosby Faculty Grants Program awarded UMBS $17,413 to fully fund its summer camp for children of researchers, students and staff living at the Douglas Lake campus during the 2025 field season.

Professional Life and Family

Hurst balanced her career and family life, moving frequently to accommodate her husband’s and her professional commitments and raising children.

After medical school, she took a job teaching anatomy at a medical school in Philadelphia.

“The first class I taught was made up on 120 students and only one was a woman. No people of color,” Hurst said.

She married David Hurst, a United Methodist minister, and they had three sons.

She switched to working part time when her husband was in school.

Edie Hurst had a stint working in laboratories at the University of Delaware before moving back to Philadelphia to teach at the Woman’s Medical College in Pennsylvania.

The family moved to the Ann Arbor area in 1973, and Hurst settled into her long tenure at Eastern Michigan University as a professor of biology.

Hurst retired in 1997 from Eastern Michigan University after teaching gross anatomy and neuroanatomy to occupational therapy students for 24 years.

Her three sons also pursued careers in the science and health professions: “My oldest is a computer engineer, my middle son is an interventional radiologist, and the youngest is a nurse practitioner.”

Hurst has four grandchildren, including one who just graduated from Boise State in bioscience and will be doing graduate work in the same field.

Her husband died in 2021.

Activity, Aging and Community

As their boys grew up, Hurst and her husband regularly returned to northern Michigan to visit UMBS and go hiking.

In the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, they enrolled in one-week mini-courses at the remote campus along Douglas Lake to learn new things about the natural world. The mini-courses were personal enrichment classes for adults — not for college credits.

At 99 years old, Hurst still finds joy in learning and laughs about nearly everything.

When asked the key to her longevity, she answered like a scientist.

“It’s partly being active and partly genetics,” Hurst said. “I love to move.”

Hurst has a regular workout regimen.

She goes to the gym three times a week to take a sitting aerobics class at the University of Michigan.

It’s not only exercise but staying engaged and being part of a community.

The value of feeling included and welcome deeply resonated with Hurst from the first time she arrived at the U-M Biological Station eight decades ago. 

The UMBS community was foundational to her education and career and provided not only knowledge, but also resilience, adaptability and a dynamic professional network.

Less than one year shy of official centenarian status, Hurst remains a strong advocate for current college students to take advantage of the experiential, field-based learning available at UMBS, in its second century of operations.

“Today students have such different needs, but some things don’t change,” Hurst said. “If you’re going to have a professional existence — especially dealing with anything alive — you need to experience the Bio Station. It enlarges your perspective. The faculty come from a variety of perspectives, places, interests and backgrounds. It’s a great benefit to make connections that influence your career.”

The University of Michigan Biological Station serves as a gathering place to learn from the natural world, advance research and education, and inspire action. We leverage over a century of research and transformative experiences to drive discoveries and solutions to benefit Michigan and beyond.

Our vast campus engages all of the senses. Its remote, natural setting nurtures deep thought and scientific discovery.

Founded in 1909, UMBS supports long-term research and education through immersive, field-based courses and features state-of-the-art equipment and facilities for data collection and analysis to help any field researcher be productive. It is where students and scientists from across the globe live and work as a community to learn from the place.

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