Bernice Eddy was born in Glendale, West Virginia, but grew up in Marietta, Ohio, after her father’s death. She took pre-medical courses at Marietta College, intending to be a physician like her father and two brothers.
During her senior year of college, she was awarded a fellowship in bacteriology at the University of Cincinnati, where she also obtained her masters and Ph.D. She later researched leprosy at a Public Health Service hospital in Louisiana, where she met her future husband Dr. Jerald G. Wooley. Eddy and Wooley both joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where Eddy Joined the Laboratory of Biologics Control (which became the Division of Biologics Standards [DBS] in 1955) in 1937.
