Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen is a prominent Danish-American physiologist, who became the first woman president of the American Physiological Society

American Physiological Society

The American Physiological Society was founded in 1887 with 28 members. Of them, 21 were graduates of medical schools, but only 12 had studied in schools that had a professor of physiology. Today, the APS has 10,500 members, most of whom hold doctoral degrees in medicine, physiology or other...

 in 1975.

Biography

Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen was born on November 3, 1918 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of four children of two eminent physiologists, the Nobel Laureate August Krogh and Marie Krogh.
Her father, August Krogh received the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 for Physiology or Medicine in 1920 for his work on the regulation of muscle oxygen delivery via capillaries and arterioles.

Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen married Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, a fellow physiologist, and received doctoral degrees in Dentistry, Odontology, and Physiology from the University of Copenhagen

University of Copenhagen

The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...

. Knut and Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen became a prominent physiology team at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, but divorced in 1966. Bodil became Department Chair at Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University is a private research university located in Cleveland, Ohio, USA...

 and later devoted her career full-time to research at Mont Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

.

Distinguished Mentor and Scientist Award

The Bodil M. Schmidt-Nielsen Distinguished Mentor and Scientist Award honors a member of the American Physiological Society who is judged to have made outstanding contributions to physiological research and demonstrated dedication and commitment to excellence in training of young physiologists.

Selected works

• The Solubility of tooth substance in relation to the composition of saliva (Supplementum; v.2, 1946)
• The resourcefulness of nature in physiological adaptation to the environment (Physiologist 1(2): 4-20, 1958)
• August and Marie Krogh: Lives in Science (1995)