Jane Hinton

Dr. Jane Hinton (1919–2003) was a pioneer in the study of bacterial antibiotic resistance and one of the first two African-American women to gain the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (1949). Prior to her veterinary medicine studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she had been a laboratory technician at Harvard, co-developing the Mueller–Hinton agar, a culture medium that is now commonly used to test bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics. She later practiced as a small animal veterinarian in Massachusetts, and then as a federal government inspector investigating disease outbreak in livestock for the Department of Agriculture.