Jean Hanson

Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this BBC nicknamed her "Mrs Muscle" on the 50th anniversary of the discovery.