Cresswell Shearer
Cresswell Shearer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 24 May 1874 |
| Died | 6 February 1941 (aged 66) |
| Alma mater | Johns Hopkins University, McGill University |
| Family | Norma Shearer (actress) |
| Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge, McGill University, Johns Hopkins University, Stazione Zoologica |
Cresswell Shearer, FRS (24 May 1874 – 6 February 1941), was a Canadian-British zoologist and University of Cambridge lecturer in experimental embryology.
At Cambridge, he motivated his students to develop a keen interest in hands-on research, inviting them to practical marine-research experience at the Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom during the summer months. It is also where Shearer and Dorothy Jordan Lloyd worked as early pioneers on how to rear parthenogenetic sea-urchin larvae through metamorphosis. He also conducted research there with Harold Munro Fox and Walter de Morgan on the genetics of sea-urchin hybrids.
During World War I (1914–1918), Shearer returned to medicine, working at Davenport Military Hospital in Plymouth. Due to an outbreak of cerebrospinal fever amongst the troops, he improved cultivation methods to study meningococcus, a bacterium involved in some forms of meningitis and cerebrospinal infection.
He pursued lifelong interests in both photography and Italian architecture, publishing The Renaissance of Architecture in Southern Italy in 1935. Shearer's architectural photographs contribute to the Conway Library archive at London's Courtauld Institute of Art; the photograps which are being digitised as part of the Courtauld Connects project.