Background
Born in North Girard, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Washington after her father transferred there for a government job.
herpetologist illustrator Zoologist
Born in North Girard, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Washington after her father transferred there for a government job.
She earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland in 1933 with a thesis on blue crab musculature.
Foreign many years. While an undergraduate student at George Washington University (Bachelor of Arts 1920, Mississippi 1921), she worked for the War Department and became Aide in the Division of Herpetology at the United States National Museum. Although the museum was under the curatorship of Leonhard Hess Stejneger, Cochran was responsible for the administration of the herpetological collections. In 1927 she became Assistant Curator and in 1942, Associate Curator just prior to Stejneger"s death.
She became the first woman Curator in 1956 until her retirement in 1968 on her 70th birthday.
After completing studies at Corcoran Art School and developing her talents as an artist, Cochran became a scientific illustrator not only for her own works, but for those of her colleagues. Cochran"s research was focused primarily on the herpetofauna of the West Indies and South America, particularly Haiti.
She published 90 taxonomic papers between 1922 and her death (four days after her retirement in 1968) in which she described eight new genera and 125 species and subspecies as well as wartime booklets for the military identifying venomous reptiles. Her 20 years of studies of the West Indies culminated in The Herpetology of Hispaniola in 1941.
She visited Haiti twice, in 1935 and 1962-1963.
Her most popular book was Living Amphibians of the World, published in 1961. Cochran personally collected over 3,000 frogs in an expedition to Brazil a decade earlier and had written about South American frogs in Frogs of Southeastern Brazil in 1954 and Frogs of Colombia in 1970 (posthumously).