Guest Author - Alegra Bartzat

Carmen Velasquez was born in the Philipines in 1913. She was always interested in the world surrounding her as she grew up, and had a keen interest in the beaches and the vast ocean, since there are plenty of them on the islands of the Phillipines.

As a young woman, she studied zoology at University of the Philippines. She excelled in her studies and earned her degree in 1934. Though it was a difficult transition to come to the United States, she went on to earn her Master of Science in Zoology from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1937. She missed the oceans most of all!

Afterwards she returned to her home in the Phillipines to earn her doctoral degree in Parasitology in 1954, again from University of the Philippines. She was very happy to be back in her native Phillipines, and again surrounded by the oceans she would study for the rest of her career.

She was one of the first notable women scientists in the Phillipines. She studied fish parasitology, and the Phillipines were the perfect place to do it. Here she discovered thirty-two species and one new genus of digenetic trematodes on the fish populations of the Phillipines.

In addition, she also discovered two new trematode species in birds and five that parasitize mammals. She defined life cycles of nine species of trematodes in the families: Transversotrematidae, Echinostromatidae, Notocotylidae, Plagiorchidae, Heterophyidae, Microphallidae, and Philophtalmidae. She discovered two new species of nematodes in Philippine fishes and a parasitic copepod. And add to that list a new species of Capillaria found in human intestines!

She was one busy scientist, discovering all these microscopic species in the fish of the oceans around the Phillipines. I can't help but wonder how she came across that human parasite...

During her career, she was published internationally and received numerous prestigious awards. You can find her articles in such journals as "The Journal of Parasitology."