John Philip Trinkaus papers

John Philip Trinkaus was born on May 23, 1918, in Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York, to Charles Edward Trinkaus and Franciska Magdelena Kruger. He studied at Wesleyan and Columbia Universities and then received his Ph.D. in 1948 from Johns Hopkins. Trinkaus then joined the faculty of the zoology department (later the biology department) at Yale University, where he stayed until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1988. Trinkaus, known as Trink to friends and colleagues, was a popular and respected teacher—known for his political activism and his zest for life—and a dedicated researcher. Throughout his life he relished being “at the bench,” as he referred to lab work.

Trinkaus specialized in the fields of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. He performed research at the Station Marine, Roscoff, Brittany in France and at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he spent many summers. At MBL, Trinkaus served on the faculty of the very embryology course that he had been a student in during the summer of 1939. He was a summer investigator at the MBL and in 1948 became a member of the MBL Corporation. In 1987 he received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health that allowed him to continue his research after retiring from Yale.