Youatt, Jean Beatrice (1925 - )

Dr Jean Youatt was a CHEMISTRY LECTURER while doing microbiological research at Monash University from 1962-1990. Jean still works at the University in her retirement.
Jean established her international reputation working with a fungi called ALLOMYCES. She said: "Fungi were new for me. I had always worked with bacteria, where all you see is a little dot or dash, but these things grew like little trees: they had roots and branches and produced different kinds of fruiting structures. Looking down the microscope, you could actually watch what was happening; you could then take samples away and analyse them to see chemically what was happening. I decided this was the nicest combination of things I could possibly get."
She was born in China on 13 March 1925 and educated at Melbourne University after being "enclosed in a compound" by the Japanese for 4 years during the war.
Her Phd work at Leeds on an autotroph organism is still being cited as the organism is being used to deal with industrial waste. She worked for a number of years in Melbourne on a drug that was used to treat tuberculosis.

(Source: Royal Australian Chemical Institute - Chemist Profiles www.raci.org.au/New_Site_ 2001/chemporf.shtml)

[NB: the above biography was researched and written by Philida Sturgiss-Hoy]

See also

• Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, 'Where are the Women in Australian science?', 22 August 2003, http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/wisa/wisa.html. [ Details... ]
• Lofthouse, Andrea (ed.), Who's who of Australian women, Methuen Australia, North Ryde (NSW), 1982, 504 pp. [ Details... ]