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Margaret Elizabeth Rey (b. May 16 in Hamburg Germany d December 21, 1996 in Cambridge?)
Author of children’s books
Margret Rey was born Margarete Elisabeth Waldstein in Germany. Since she was Jewish, she moved to London as a photographer and then traveled to Rio de Janerio, Brazil where she met her husband, the German-born Hans A Reysenbach, who had been working there since the 1920s. After they married in 1935, they moved to Paris. A French publisher became interested in Hans’ drawings and commissioned him to write a children’s book, published as Rafi and the Nine Monkeys which included a curious monkey that was the inspiration of the future children’s book Curious George. The beginning of the Second World War meant that the Reys needed to flee again before Paris fell to the Nazis. They traveled to Lisbon and then back to Brazil and from there to New York, talking the illustrated manuscript of the new book they had just written. The books were published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941 (A collector's edition with the original watercolors was recently released.) Curious George was an instant success. They wrote seven stories in all, with Hans doing the most of the illustrations and Margret working primarily on the stories, though they shared much of the work Margret's name was left off the cover, but this was corrected in later editions. They collaborated on other children’s books as well.
In 1963 Margret Rey and her husband moved to Cambridge near Harvard Square. Hans died in in 1977. Soon after, Margret was approached by Alan Shallek who persuaded her to collaborate on a series of short films for television that began to appear on the Disney Channel in 1980. Margret contined to write and teach. In 1979, she was appointed At Brandeis University as a professor of Creative Writing. In 1989 Margret Rey established the Curious George Foundation intended to benefit children's creativity and animal and environmental welfare. She was also a long-time supporter of Longy School of Music and founded a center of alternative medicine in one of the Boston hospitals. She died at the age of ninety, ten years before PBS began its new series of programs based on Curious George. The de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississppi, Hattiesburg holds the Rey archive.

Ellen (Swallow) Richards (b. December 3, 1842 in Dunstable, MA, d.. March 30, 1911 in Boston)
Professor of Sanitary Chemistry and Home Economics
Ellen Swallow was born in the small town of Dunstable, MA to Fanny and Peter Swallow. She attended Westford Academy in Westford, MA, graduating in 1863. After studying and then teaching in Worcester, she went to Vassar College, which had just opened at an advanced level, graduating in 1870. She then had the opportunity to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a special student, the first woman to be accepted at any scientific school. In 1873, she received a second bachelor’s degree from MIT and a master’s degree from Vassar. She continued to study at MIT and to work under John Nichols on practical problems, such as water safety for the state. In 1873 she married Robert Hallowell Richards, a professor of mining engineering at MIT.
With the help of the Women’s Education Association of Boston, Ellen Richards established a Woman’s Laboratory at MIT in 1876 under the directorship of John M. Ordway, which offered training to women in a wide range of sciences; Richards was named an instructor at the laboratory. When women were admitted as MIT undergraduates to regular laboratories in 1883, the women’s laboratory closed. Richards was then appointed an instructor in sanitary chemistry and continued to work in the field of sanitation and home economics (a field she helped establish) until her death. She also created a Center for Right Living in her home in Jamaica Plain, testing foods and promoting sanitation. She published two widely cited books, The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882) and Air Water and Food from a Sanitary Point of View (1900).
References: Notable American Women Vol 3; Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey Dictionary of Women Scientists (2000); Ancker, Jessica Scalzi, Domesticity, Science, and Social Control: Ellen Swallow Richards and the New England Kitchen (1987).