Lilian Vaughan Morgan (née Sampson; July 7, 1870 – December 6, 1952) was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan.

After the death of her parents, Morgan and her older sister Edith were raised by her maternal grandparents in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

[1] In the autumn of 1891, a Morgan earned a fellowship, which enabled her to study the musculature of chitons at the University of Zurich with Arnold Lang, a comparative anatomist and student of Ernst Haeckel.

[1] She returned to Bryn Mawr in 1892, where she earned a Master of Science in biology in 1894, under the advisory of Thomas Morgan.

They spent the following summer in California, where she researched and published work on planarian regeneration at the Stanford Marine Laboratory.

Instead, he gave her working space in his laboratory, called the "Fly Room," at Columbia University, where she maintained her own Drosophila stocks but held no official position.

[1] Her husband and the other male scientists never became comfortable with her presence in the lab, whose atmosphere was "a little like that of an exclusive men's club.

Because she didn't hold an official position, she never attended a scientific meeting and never presented a paper at a conference.

Her husband died in 1945; one year afterwards, Morgan received her first official appointment as a research associate at the age of 76.