Dr. Jane Hinton (1919–2003) was a pioneer in the study of bacterial antibiotic resistance and one of the first two African-American women to gain the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (1949).

[1] Prior to her veterinary medicine studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she had been a laboratory technician at Harvard, co-developing the Mueller–Hinton agar, a culture medium that is now commonly used to test bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics.

She returned to the United States to complete high school at Montpelier Seminary in Vermont in 1935, before earning her undergraduate degree at the age of 20 from Simmons College in 1939.

[12] Prior to her veterinary career, Jane Hinton worked in a laboratory in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at Harvard University, where she co-developed the Mueller–Hinton agar with John Howard Mueller.

[13] Mueller and Hinton discovered that starch within the agar helped aid bacterial growth and prevented bacteria toxins from interfering with antibiotic testing.