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Pauline Schaap

Personal Professor of Developmental Signalling, University of Dundee.

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 16, 2025
Entity authorityQ34992047
Source-derived summary

Pauline Schaap is a Dutch cell biologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a professor of Developmental Signalling at the University of Dundee., a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

She studies the evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation in social amoebae.

Biography

Schaap received her PhD in 1987 from the University of Leiden. She was a professor at the University of Leiden until 1999, when she moved to the University of Dundee where she is currently a professor. She became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

Professional contributions

Schaap and her collaborators established the first molecular phylogeny of the Dictyostelia. That work showed that complex multicellular fruiting bodies had evolved multiple times independently, contrary to what had previously been generally thought.

Editorial summary

“Pauline Schaap” enters the record as personal Professor of Developmental Signalling, University of Dundee. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pauline, Schaap and Personal can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1987, 1999, 2011—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Pauline, Schaap and Personal.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Pauline Schaap” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Pauline, Schaap and Personal provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q34992047. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1999 and 2011.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Pauline Schaap”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Pauline Schaap primary sources, Pauline Schaap archive and Pauline research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Pauline Schaap”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Pauline Schaap” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.