Mary Beatrice Thomas

Mary Beatrice Thomas (15 October 1873 - 14 June 1954) was a lecturer in chemistry at Royal Holloway College and later at Girton College, Cambridge where she was also Director of Studies. She was a noted educator, co-editing a chemistry textbook written by Ida Freund, as well as being one of the nineteen signatories to a petition to the Chemical Society arguing for admission of women as Fellows of the Society.

Career Thomas' father was "Wild William" Thomas, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at Mason College, Birmingham, and he encouraged her to pursue chemistry. Thomas attended King Edward VI High School and then attended Newnham College, taking the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1897 and 1898. She then became a demonstrator at Royal Holloway College for two years, joining (and eventually succeeding) Dorothy Marshall. In 1901 she studied at Birmingham having obtained a Priestley Scholarship, after which she returned to Cambridge to teach chemistry at Girton College. Her work here was noted later by one of her students, Dorothy Needham (who graduated in 1919): However, pressures of teaching meant that her efforts shifted to education,

As well as working to develop chemistry education at Girton, Thomas was a co-editor of Ida Freund's posthumously published book Experimental Basis of Chemistry. Thomas also organised the Ida Freund Memorial Fund. (one of the Societies that amalgamated to become the Royal Society of Chemistry), as well as identifying prominent female chemists working in Britain at this time. Thomas also found a means to make a personal protest, by way of not paying education rates levied on house-holders.