Mortimer, Iva (1898-1992)

Iva Mortimer

Iva Mortimer, who taught Foods and Nutrition at the UW for twenty-five years, first planned to become a zoologist. She earned a BA in Botany (1920) and an MS in Zoology (1927), both from the UW. In 1927, she married George B. Mortimer, Professor of Agronomy at the UW. Seven years later, she was left widowed with one child. She returned to work part-time in the zoology department but soon found it necessary to change fields in order to support herself and her daughter. She sold her home and moved with her daughter to an apartment and returned to school in 1935.

Over the following decade, she earned three more degrees from UW--a BS in Home Economics in 1939, an MS in Foods and Nutrition in 1940, and a PhD in Foods and Nutrition and Zoology in 1947. Her PhD was a combined degree supervised jointly by Helen Parsons and Zoology professor Lowell Loland. After receiving her doctorate she became an assistant professor and later a full professor of Foods and Nutrition. Until her retirement in 1965, she taught courses such as her own course in "Problems and Food Supply" (HE4) and assisted May Reynolds in "Nutrition and Dietetics" (HE6) and Dorothy Hussemann Strong in "Introduction to Food Study" (HE3).