Isabel Bevier (1860-1942) was born in November 1860, and grew up on a 200-acre farm near Plymouth, Ohio during the Civil War. Her mother, Cornelia Brinkerhoff, was of Dutch heritage and her father, Caleb Bevier, had a French background. She was the youngest of nine children and she was raised in a culture where both men and women were taught to work hard. She graduated from the University of Wooster in Ohio with a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1885. Later she got a master's degree in Latin and German. While she was a high school instructor at Mount Vernon, Ohio, her fiance Elmer Strain, who had just finished Harvard Medical School, drowned. After that she decided to make her career in the field of science. She taught at Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh for nine years.

In 1900, Andrew Sloan Draper, the fourth President of the UI, called her and asked her to start a new department for household science at the UI. She noticed Illinois was flat and muddy with hardly any trees but
one reason she decided to accept the job was because both men and women studied here. She believed that women and men should be treated equally and that women should know sciences and architecture so they could lead a better life.

Isabel Bevier started the household science department at the UI in 1900. She taught her first courses on the top floor of the Natural History Building without any laboratories or kitchens. The department wasn't
judged on cooking but on teaching and laboratory work. In 1903, the first three women graduated from household science. In 1905 her department moved to the newly built Woman's Building now called the English Building. She was professor and head of the department 21 years. In 1907, Isabel Bevier was the first person in this country to have the idea of using thermometers in cooking meat. She studied other foods and
she wrote bulletins and many books. During her time more than 5,000 women graduated from her department, which became the best in the country. In a speech Isabel Bevier gave in 1920, she said both women and men should be educated in both the sciences and the arts. She retired from teaching home economics on September 1, 1930. Isabel Bevier died on March 17, 1942, at age 81. After Miss Bevier's death a building was built for home economics and it was named Bevier Hall because of her outstanding work. She was the first woman member of the UI faculty to become a professor, and also the first woman to receive the
rank of professor emerita from the UI.