Catherine Skinner, 1931-2025

Courtesy Thalassa Skinner ’86

Among other things, geologist H. Catherine Skinner was the first woman to serve a full term as head of a Yale residential college. View full image

In her early 20s, master’s degree from Radcliffe in hand, Cathy Wild Skinner set sail with her new husband, Brian Skinner (who later become the Eugene Higgins Professor of Geology & Geophysics at Yale), to his home country of Australia, leaving behind everything she knew to live and study on the other side of the world.

By the time of her death on July 30, at the age of 94, H. Catherine Skinner, senior researcher in the geology and geophysics department (now earth and planetary sciences) and a leading figure in the study of medical geology, had achieved prominence in a field long dominated by men. (Medical geology focuses on the relationship between natural geologic factors and human and animal health.) She had racked up notable firsts—including becoming the first woman to serve a full term as head of a residential college (Jonathan Edwards, which she led from 1977 to 1982), and the first woman elected president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. She had descended mine shafts in pursuit of her research and navigated the challenges of the 1977 campus strike that occurred early in her JE tenure. 

“Nothing,” says Thalassa Skinner ’86, the youngest of Cathy and Brian’s three daughters, “intimidated my mother.”

While Brian taught at the University of Adelaide, Cathy completed her PhD in mineralogy. They returned a few years later to the United States and took jobs with the federal government, and Cathy came to Yale in 1967. Over the course of her career at Yale, in addition to her position in EPS, Cathy Skinner held affiliate positions at the Peabody Museum and in the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation at the School of Medicine. 

Skinner mentored scores of students and colleagues. Peter Jokl ’64, ’68MD, professor emeritus of orthopaedics and rehabilitation, credits Skinner, his thesis advisor during his residency, with teaching him “the rigors of well-documented and reproducible scientific research.” Maureen Long, the Bruce D. Alexander ’65 Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and current chair of EPS, remembers Skinner “both as an exceptional scientist and a supportive presence for her junior colleagues. Not only was she a trailblazer for women in science, but she was always open about both the challenges and rewards of combining a science career and family life.” 

Skinner deeply engaged with the local community. “My mother was in perpetual motion in both body and mind,” Thalassa Skinner says. Cathy Skinner volunteered with the Connecticut Fund for the Environment and the New Haven YWCA. She created a professional women’s group that met monthly for more than four decades, and she was a founding member of the Investors’ Strategy Institute, which educated women on growing their financial futures. She was an avid gardener, kept bees, baked her own bread and granola, and loved to knit.  

Most of all, her daughter says, “She always met people on their own level. She was intensely interested in you and your story and how she could help you. My mother opened doors for people who didn’t even realize that there were doors to be opened.”