Jessie Isabelle Price (January 1, 1930 – November 12, 2015) was a veterinary microbiologist. She isolated and reproduced the cause of the most common life-threatening disease in duck farming in the 1950s and developed vaccines for this and other avian diseases. A graduate of Cornell University, where she gained a PhD (1959), she worked first at the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory and later at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. She served as chair of the Predoctoral Minority Fellowship Ad Hoc Review Committee of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and as president of Graduate Women in Science. Early life and education Jessie Price was born in Montrose, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Teresa Price, raised her daughter on her own in difficult financial circumstances. Price was the only African-American in her class, at a school where there were only two other Black students. After graduating from Montrose High School, she was accepted into Cornell University, moving with her mother to Ithaca to take advanced high classes in mathematics and English for a year. Tuition fees were waived because of her New York residency and grades. She wanted to be a physician, but could not because of the cost. Price gained a Bachelor of Science in the College of Agriculture in 1953. Her mentor, Dorsey Bruner, recommended post-graduate studies, but finances prohibited it. Price worked for three years as a laboratory technician in the Poultry Disease Research Farm in the Veterinary College at Cornell to save for further study. She gained research assistant support for 1956 to 1959, gaining a Masters in 1958, and doctorate in 1959, supervised by Bruner. Her Master's thesis was "Morphological and Cultural Studies of Pleuropneumonia-like Organisms and Their Variants Isolated from Chickens". For her doctoral dissertation, Price isolated and reproduced the bacterium, Pasteurella anatipestifer, in white pekin ("Long Island") ducklings infected with a disease that was a major killer among duck farmers at that time. Her dissertation was published by Cornell University in 1959. Career and later life After her PhD, Price joined the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory, where she worked from 1959 to 1977, teaching at Long Island University, where she became an adjunct professor. She worked on developing a vaccine, undertaking trials of mixed flocks of vaccinated and unvaccinated ducklings, working every day, and conducting daily autopsies. In 1964, Ebony magazine featured Price and her work in an extensive photo-essay describing and showing her work