Lynn Riddiford

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Lynn Moorhead Riddiford (born 1936 in Tennessee as Lynn Virginia Moorhead) is an American entomologist and developmental biologist. She was the first woman on the Harvard Biology Department faculty, serving as an assistant and then associate professor, and she is now an emeritus professor at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on how hormones control insect growth, especially in the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta. She studied at Radcliffe College and joined Carroll Williams’s Harvard lab during her junior year, researching juvenile hormone; this led to a Nature paper in 1959. She earned a B.S. in biochemical sciences in 1958 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Cornell University in 1961 (advised by Marcus Singer and Harold Scheraga). After postdoctoral work at Harvard with John Edsall, she taught at Wellesley College, then returned to Harvard as a research associate and rose to associate professor by 1971. In 1973 she moved to the University of Washington. She retired from UW in 2007 and became a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus (HHMI), retiring from Janelia in 2016. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2010), the Howard Vollum Award (2011), and the Washington Academy of Science (2018). She is married to James W. Truman, her former graduate student, and after leaving Janelia she and Truman established a lab at Friday Harbor Laboratories, Washington.