Charles W. Woodworth - Career Overview

Career Overview

Charles graduated with a BS in 1885 and an MS in 1886 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The funds received from the judgment in the 1884 U.S. Supreme Court Case, New England Mutual Life Ins. Co. v. Woodworth, may have helped pay for his education. During the period of 1884–1886, he was assistant to S.A. Forbes. From 1886 to 1888 he studied at Harvard University under Hermann August Hagen, who, at the time, was the leading entomologist of the U.S. He returned between 1900 and 1901 and worked under William E. Castle. In 1888, he was appointed entomologist and botanist at the University of Arkansas's Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station. On September 4, 1889, he married Leonora Stern in Rolla, Missouri, the city where her parents, Edward Stern and Lizzie Hardin Evans Stern, lived. Charles suffered from successive attacks of malaria while in Arkansas. He left there in 1891 to become assistant in entomology at the University of California (now UC Berkeley) where he founded and built up the Division of Entomology. He also participated in the development of the Agricultural Experiment Station, now known as UC Davis, and is also considered the founder of the Entomology Department there.

At Berkeley, he rose to be Assistant Professor in 1891, Associate Professor in 1904, Professor in 1913, and was named Emeritus Professor upon his retirement in 1930.