About 100 Brown community members gathered Friday to commemorate the life of Marjorie Thompson ’74 PhD’79 P’02 P’07 P’09 P’12 P’14 P’16, late associate dean of biological sciences, at a public memorial service in the First Unitarian Church of Providence.
The service drew a crowd of diverse age groups, a testament to the mark Thompson — who died Sept. 15 while on leave — left on the lives of both students and fellow faculty members during her more than 40 years at Brown.
University Chaplain Janet Cooper Nelson commenced the ceremony, recalling the countless “number of times in the 25 years I’ve been at Brown that Marjorie’s name has come into my office as an invocation of all the things we do best at Brown.”
Speeches from Thompson’s colleagues, mentees and students echoed Nelson’s sentiments.
When Jack Elias, dean of medicine and biological sciences, told his colleagues at Yale Medical School that he was leaving for College Hill, Brown alums then studying at Yale rushed to his office to ensure “that I understood the legend of Marjorie Thompson,” Elias recalled. “I’ve never met — in my time at Penn, Yale or Brown — anybody with a more profound legacy than Marge Thompson.”
That legacy includes a deep influence on the Division of Biology and Medicine, which houses six of the University’s concentrations, including one of its largest.
“She guided, she shaped and she drove our biology department,” said Ken Miller ’70 P’02, professor of biology.
Miller added that Thompson’s influence on advising was particularly notable.
Her commitment to students was a resounding theme of the speakers’ anecdotes.
“No person on this campus touched as many students, shaped as many lives,” Miller said.
Jennifer Bauer ’06 recalled walking into Thompson’s office early in her undergraduate career to ask about a single course. She walked out “with a full academic map” for the remainder of her Brown experience, she said.
Thompson’s attentiveness to her students often manifested in the form of laser-quick email responses — a quality that a majority of the afternoon’s 11 speakers mentioned.
Hadley Witt ’14 said she once paused in the middle of writing an email to Thompson to talk to a friend. While she was explaining to that friend how quickly Thompson responded to every one of her emails, Witt received a message from Thompson.
Thompson had anticipated and responded to Witt’s question before Witt even presented it to her.
When Witt recounted the same anecdote to a professor, that professor said of Thompson: “She doesn’t sleep. She waits,” Witt recalled.
But away from the classroom and the office, Thompson was also a caring mother of seven children, speakers said.
“Someone I saw as a University superwoman was, before all else, a mom,” Bauer said.
Other speakers recalled Thompson welcoming them into her home and mentoring them long after they graduated from Brown as they pursued higher degrees elsewhere.
Speakers also noted Thompson’s talent as a performer who played the guitar and sang. One of Thompson’s former students played a song from her first album.
Thompson’s commitment to her students, children, career and musical pursuits exemplifies the idea that one does not need to choose between a successful career and a fulfilling personal life, multiple speakers said.
“She just kept saying yes to herself,” Elena Suglia ’15 said, adding that Thompson’s willingness to pursue her own varied goals taught her students to do the same.
The Division of Biology and Medicine intends to create an award in Thompson’s honor that will be given to “a graduating senior who has proven to be an outstanding student and student-educator in biology,” Elias and Associate Dean for Biology Edward Hawrot wrote in an email to the division. A definite monetary amount for the award has yet to be established, Elias told The Herald.
“The fact that this is happening, and it’s happening so quickly and with so many different facets of the Brown campus rallying, tells you about the influence that this woman has had on this university,” Elias said.
“It’s hard to fathom the degree of the loss that we had with her passing,” he added.
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