Helen Elizabeth Shearburn Clark

Helen Elizabeth Shearburn Rotman (née Clark; 21 January 1936 – 27 August 2014) was a New Zealand expert on echinoderms, specifically starfish.

The PhD thesis title was “Revision of the Southern Hemisphere Asteroidea Order Paxillosida” and her first scientific publication was on Anareaster, a new genus of asteroid from Antarctica.

She wrote for Antarctic magazine saying "When we were on station my trawl invariably came at the end and this necessitated long hours of weary waiting.

After that she moved to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana in the years 1964–1966 to teach zoology.

[2] She worked for a time at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., with David Pawson, a fellow New Zealander.

They were able to justify the name in formal classical terms—aster means star, and damn, comes from the Latin verb damnare, to adjudge, affirm or sentence.

[13] Circeaster helenae is a starfish named in her honour based on a holotype found 145 nautical miles NW off Port Hedland, Western Australia.

The feature is named Helen ES Clark Seamount and is located in the Southern Ocean at -72.8 latitude, -160.3 longitude.