Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the people behind the numbers. She sometimes describes statistical data as
“human beings with the tears removed.”)
As a teenager, she was also involved in the civil rights movement, serv-
ing as a local organizer for marches in Washington, D.C. and in Selma,
Alabama.Although she was not aware of it at the time, she found out many
years later that her father had been active in integrating the armed forces.
After graduation from high school, Davis enrolled as a junior at the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh. She majored in sociology with a minor in biology, and
gained additional science training by working in the labs and typing disser-
tations. She graduated in 3 years with a B.S. in physiological psychology and
an M.A. in sociology. A Danforth fellowship—one of the few given to
female students in 1966—allowed her to pursue a doctorate at the Univer-
sity of Chicago.
Davis completed requirements for a Ph.D. in science studies (an interdis-
ciplinary program in the history of culture) in 2 years. She passed her exam
2 years later, in 1972, after a brief marriage and divorce. By that time, she
was already an assistant professor of sociology and director of interdiscipli-
nary studies at Queens College of the City University of New York.There
she continued her social activism in the antiwar movement and met
another young faculty activist, an economist named Richard Morgenstern,
who was studying the disparity in salaries paid to male and female aca-
demics.They married in 1975 and had two children, a son, Aaron, born in
1976, and a daughter, Lea, born in 1979. In the years that followed, Davis
and Morgenstern often found their work dovetailing, as both were drawn
into the world of environmental policy.
To have more time for her children while they were very young, Davis
left teaching and accepted three postdoctoral fellowships between 1971 and
1982.The first was in neurology and neurotoxicology and included a study
of acupuncture. The second was in neurotoxicology and toxicology with
Larry Ng of the National Institutes of Health and resulted in their topic
Strategies for Public Health: Promoting Health and Preventing Disease,
published
in 1981. Davis had by then moved to Washington to work as an advisor to
the US Environmental Protection Agency. Her husband was also at the
EPA, as chief economist, running major environmental programs. Davis's
third fellowship was with Abraham Lilienfeld, a renowned epidemiologist
at Johns Hopkins University. It was Lilienfeld who awakened her interest
in epidemiology and propelled her toward a career that from its inception
