Harriet Exline Lloyd was born in Washington in 1909. At the age of sixteen Exline entered Reed College with the intent to study language and literature, however soon became interested in chemistry and biology. After that, she has done six-year graduate study at the University of Washington, spending summers and Fridays at Harbor Biological Station. In 1936, Exline earned her PhD at the University of Washington and was awarded the Sterning Fellowship at Yale for postdoctoral studies in arachnological research with Professor Alexander Petrunkevitch. She was the first woman to receive this scholarship. On 29 August 1938, Exline married a fellow scientist Donald L. Frizzell in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She chose marriage over fellowship renewal and sailed for Peru at the end of academic year. They remained in Ecuador and Peru during next five years working together and individually on arachnology and paleontology researches.
Work
In September 1943, the couple went to Seattle where Exline stayed till the end of WWII working as an instructor in the zoology department at the University of Washington. Having finished the academic year at the university in 1945, Exline joined her husband in Austin. Next three years she worked as guest researcher in spiders in the Department of Zoology at the University of Texas. In 1948, the Frizzels moved to Rolla, where Exline was continuing her research on spiders at the University of Missouri. During this time she was named a Fellow and Research Associate of the California Academy of Sciences. Exline was working jointly with her husband on holothuriansclerites and co-authored with him Monograph of fossil holothurian sclerites, published in 1955. In 1958, Don L. Frizzel wrote that his wife was deeply involved in micropaleontological research and co-authored with him three papers. In 1958-1959 Exline went on a holiday trip to Gulf Coast where she collected spiders and continued her spider studies. From 1960 until 1967, Exline worked as taxonomist and consultant for a National Science Foundation project in spider biology at the University of Arkansas. She was devoting around one third of her time to this project. Exline's work American Spiders of the Genus Argyrodes , published in 1962 was highly appreciated by researcher A. Chickering who called it “the most comprehensive work published to date on this highly interesting but difficult genus of “comb-footed” spiders.” After the death of Professor Petrunkevitch in 1964, Exline organized and edited his unpublished works publishing them posthumously. In September 1967, Exline's heath rapidly declined and she was hospitalized. She died in February 1968. After her death, her spider collections were given to the California Academy. The Harriet Exline Frizzell Memorial Fund was created in her honour.
