The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#3601
Susan Hallowell
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Susan Hallowell was an American botanist and Professor of Botany at Wellesley College. She was a teacher and mentor of botanist Margaret Clay Ferguson. Life Hallowell began a teaching career shortly after graduating from Colby College.
Go to Profile#3602
Carmel Humphries
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Carmel Humphries MRIA B.Sc. M.Sc. PhD D.Sc. was an Irish zoologist, specialist in fresh water Chironomidae. She was the first female professor of zoology and head of department in Ireland, and devised a technique for the identification of chironomid flies that is still employed today.
Go to Profile#3603
Lydia DeWitt
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Lydia Maria DeWitt was an American pathologist and anatomist. Early life and education Lydia Maria Adams was born in Flint, Michigan to Oscar and Elizabeth Adams, the second of three children. Her father was an attorney. Elizabeth died when Lydia was five, leaving her sister, who later married Oscar, to raise Lydia and her siblings.
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Alice Haskins
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Alice Crane Haskins Swingle was an American government botanist. With her husband, botanist Deane Bret Swingle , she co-authored the 1928 book A Textbook of Systematic Botany. Life and career Haskins was born on 24 April 1880, in Acton, Massachusetts to Helen A. Crane and John R. Haskins. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1903. Haskins worked as a research assistant in the Plant Pathology Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1903 to 1906.
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Elsie M. Burrows
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Elsie May Burrows was an English botanist who made significant contributions to British postwar phycology. Her primary area of research was macroalgal ecology, focusing particularly on Fucus, a genus of brown algae, and Chlorophyta, a division of the green algae.
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Cornelia Channing
1938 - 1985 (47 years)
Cornelia "Nina" Channing was an American professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focused on endocrinology and fertility; along with longtime collaborators Neena Schwartz and Darrell Ward, she was involved in the discovery of hormones involved in regulating the female reproductive cycle. She died of breast cancer in 1985.
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Anna Kharadze
1905 - 1971 (66 years)
Anna Kharadze was a Soviet Georgian biologist, systematist, florist, botanist-geographer, collector, a specialist in the flora of Georgia and the Caucasus as a whole. Early life and education Anna Kharadze was born in the city of Elizavetpole in the family of a school teacher of natural sciences. She received her secondary education at a technical school in Tbilisi and then entered the biological department of the natural faculty of Tbilisi State University, from which she graduated in 1927.
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Ruth Margery Addoms
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Ruth Margery Addoms , was an American botanist at Duke University specializing in the study of plant anatomy and plant physiology. She contributed to the study of growth-promoting substances in plants.
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Eva Mameli
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Giuliana Luigia Evelina Mameli , was an Italian botanist, and naturalist. A native of Sassari, in Sardinia, in 1906 she moved to Pavia with her brother Efisio Mameli, chemist and pharmacologist at the local university, where in 1907 she graduated in Natural Sciences. In 1915 she obtained the libera docenza. While a junior lecturer at the University of Pavia, she married agronomist Mario Calvino. In 1920 Mario offered Eva Mameli a job as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where the couple went to live and where in 1923 their first child, Italo Calvino, was born.
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Maria von Linden
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Maria von Linden was a German bacteriologist and zoologist. She was the first woman admitted to study at the University of Tübingen, and became one of the first women in Germany to be given the academic title of “Professor”. She patented a type of bandage and won a prize for her research on butterfly wings. She was driven from office due to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.
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Rachel Bodley
1831 - 1888 (57 years)
Rachel Littler Bodley was an American professor, botanist, and university leader. She was best known for her term as Dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania . She helped found the American Chemical Society in New York City.
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Elizabeth Stern
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Elizabeth Stern was a Canadian-born American pathologist, especially well known for her insights on the cell's progression from a healthy to a cancerous state. Stern was one of the first scientists specializing in cytopathology, the study of diseased cells.
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Zinaida Botschantzeva
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Zinaida Petrovna Botschantzeva was a Soviet and Russian botanist, cytologist, embryologist, and professor of the Tashkent university. Botschantzeva came from a large Cossack family. In 1930 she graduated with a biology degree from the National University of Uzbekistan. In 1930-1933 she participated in expeditions to study the flora of Central Asia. Her research advisor was Alexei Ivanovich Vvedensky.
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Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya was a Soviet botanist, professor, and herbarium curator. She described over 100 plants.
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Käthe Hoffmann
1883 - Present (143 years)
Käthe Hoffmann was a German botanist who described many plant species in New Guinea and South East Asia including Annesijoa novoguineensis. She was a professor at Breslau, German Empire, and made a significant contribution to botany. In one study, she was found to have co-authored or authored 354 land plant species, the sixth-highest number authored by any female scientist. , Plants of the World Online lists 439 accepted genera and species which include Käthe Hoffmann in the authority, in some capacity.
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Augusta Vera Duthie
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Augusta Vera Duthie was a South African botanist who studied the plants of the Western Cape and was a popular teacher who lectured on cryptogamic botany. She was the first university lecturer in botany who was entirely educated in South Africa.
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Erna Walter
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Erna Walter was a German botanist, ecologist, botanical collector and bryologist. Life and work The daughter of botanist Heinrich Schenck, Erna studied botany, physics and chemistry in Darmstadt and Heidelberg. She received her doctorate in 1918 under the direction of botanist Georg Albrecht Klebs at the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation was titled: Bacteriocine von Clostridium perfringens. Walter then worked as a scientific assistant at the Botanical Institute of the University of Heidelberg with Ludwig Jost and as an intern at the Biological Reich Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. She wa...
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Ethel Irene McLennan
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Ethel Irene McLennan was an Australian botanist, mycologist and educator. Personal life and early career The daughter of George McLennan and Eleanor Tucker, she was born in Williamstown, Victoria and was educated at the Tintern Church of England Girls' Grammar School in Hawthorn. In 1914, she received a BSc from the University of Melbourne. From 1915 to 1931, she was a demonstrator and botany lecturer at the university. Her main areas of interest were mycology and plant-fungal relationships. However, she was also one of the illustrators of The Flora of the Northern Territories .
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Winifred Smith
1858 - 1925 (67 years)
Winifred Smith was an English botanist and educationist. She became a lecturer in the botany department at University College, London and took a leading role in supporting women students. First forty years She was born in Mortlake, Surrey on 5 November 1858 to Fanny and James Smith, who owned and ran a building business. Some of Smith's education was at Queen's College, London, a pioneering school for girls aged from 12 to 20. She then "devoted" herself to teaching until she began studying at University College in 1899. In the late 1870s her family experienced changes: her father went bankrup...
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Maria Petraccini
1759 - 1791 (32 years)
Maria Magdalena Petraccini Ferretti was an Italian anatomist, physician, professor of anatomy. She was born in Florence, Tuscany, 1759 and died in Bagnacavallo, Ravenna, 1791. Biography and personal life Pettracini was born in a merchant family in Tuscany. She married Italian physician and anatomy professor Francesco Ferretti. She became interested in surgery thanks to him, who was the chief at the Bagnacavallo hospital. Subsequently, Petraccini was tutored in surgery by her spouse, who taught her by operating on corpses. Her technique became so precise that she was envied even by those above her.
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Ann Stone Minot
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Ann Stone Minot was an American biochemist and physiologist. She was born in Woodsville, New Hampshire, the oldest of six children born to Jonas Minot and Sybil Buck. For their early education, Minot and her siblings attended the Bath Village School, a small three-room schoolhouse. Starting in 1911, Minot matriculated to Smith College with the help of a partial scholarship, where she majored in chemistry and English. She graduated in 1915 with an A.B. degree.
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Ethel Ronzoni Bishop
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ethel Ronzoni Bishop was an American biochemist and physiologist. Early life and education Ethel Ronzoni was born in California. She earned her BS degree from Mills College in 1913, her Master's from Columbia University in 1914, and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1923.
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Tatiana Krasnoselskaia
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Tatiana Krasnoselskaia was a botanist specializing in plant physiology from the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. Life Tatiana Abramovna Krasnoselskaia was born on 1 January 1884 in St Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. She studied physics and mathematics in the Bestuzhev Courses, graduating in 1904. She was an assistant professor at the St Petersburg Agricultural Courses and then became an assistant professor at the Bestuzhev Courses from 1909 to 1914. While teaching Krasnoselskaia earned her M.A. at Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1912. Two years later she moved to...
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Elizabeth C. Miller
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Elizabeth Cavert Miller was an American biochemist, known for fundamental research into the chemical mechanism of cancer carcinogenesis, working closely with her husband James A. Miller. Biography Miller was the daughter of an economist at the Federal Land Bank in Minneapolis. She studied biochemistry at the University of Minnesota . In 1945 she received her doctorate under Carl Baumann as a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Scholar. As a postgraduate, she worked at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she and her husband James A. Miller studied chemical carcinogenesis.
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Elzada Clover
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Elzada Clover was an American botanist who was the first to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. She and Lois Jotter became the first two women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon.
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Winifred Goldring
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Winifred Goldring , was an American paleontologist whose work included a description of stromatolites, as well as the study of Devonian crinoids. She was the first woman in the nation to be appointed as a State Paleontologist.
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Agnes Claypole Moody
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Agnes Mary Claypole Moody was an American zoologist and professor of natural science. Early life and education Agnes Mary Claypole Moody was born in Bristol, England to Jane and Edward Waller Claypole. She had a twin sister, Edith Jane Claypole , who was also a biologist. She attended Buchtel College, and in 1894 she attended Cornell University for her master's degree. She completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago in 1896.
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Effie A. Southworth
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
Effie Almira Southworth Spalding , was an American botanist and mycologist, and the first woman plant pathologist hired by the United States Department of Agriculture . Her most important discovery was the 1887 identification of the fungus Colletotrichum gossypii as the cause of cotton cankers, a disease which killed thousands of acres of cotton and was a major economic threat. She taught botany at several institutions, worked at the Desert Botanical Laboratory with her husband, and established the Botany Department Herbarium at the University of Southern California.
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Anna Vickers
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
Anna Vickers was a marine algologist and plant collector known principally for her work on algae of the Antilles and the Canary Islands. Biography Anna Vickers was born on 28 June 1852 in Bordeaux, France, though it is likely that her father was British. In 1879–80, she visited Australia and New Zealand with her family, traveling widely and becoming interested in the Maori language. In 1883 she published a monograph about these travels, Voyage en Australie et en Novelle-Zélande. Topics she touched on range from word derivations in the Maori language to the ferns and algae of south Australia. ...
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Sheina Marshall
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Sheina Macalister Marshall was a Scottish marine biologist who dedicated her life to the study of plant and animal plankton. She was an authority on the copepod Calanus. She worked at the Marine Biological Station at Millport, Cumbrae in Scotland from 1922-1964.
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Theodora Lisle Prankerd
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Theodora Lisle Prankerd was a British botanist who worked on the growth of ferns, and lectured at Bedford College and the University of Reading. Early life and education Theodora Lisle Prankerd was born in Hackney, London, the daughter of general practitioner Orlando Reeves Prankerd and his second wife, Clementina Soares. She attended Brighton High School . She then studied botany Royal Holloway, University of London, first supported by a Founders scholarship, and then a Driver Scholarship, graduating with 1st Class Honours in 1903, at the time headed by Margaret Jane Benson.
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Eleanor Albert Bliss
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Eleanor Albert Bliss was an immunologist who made significant advancements to the field of immunological research. She was also a dean and professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College. Life and education Eleanor Albert Bliss was born on December 16, 1899, in Jamestown, Rhode Island. Her family lived in Baltimore where her father, William J. Bliss was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother's name was Edith Grantham Bliss who was originally from Pennsylvania. The Bliss family lived in Baltimore for their children's entire childhood.
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Alice Carter Cook
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Alice Carter Cook , , was an American botanist and author whose plant collections are now held by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Cook was the first woman to receive a PhD in botany from an American university.
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Jane Ingham
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Rose Marie "Jane" Ingham was an English botanist and scientific translator. She was appointed research assistant to Joseph Hubert Priestley in the Botany Department at the University of Leeds, and together, they were the first to separate cell walls from the root tip of broad beans. They analysed these cell walls and concluded that they contained protein. She carried out experiments on the cork layer of trees to study how cells function under a change of orientation and found profound differences in cell division and elongation in the epidermal layer of plants.
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Kathleen E. Carpenter
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Kathleen E. Carpenter was a British freshwater ecologist. She is best known for her early studies of the effects of metal pollution on Welsh rivers and their biota, as well as her book Life in Inland Waters, the first textbook in English wholly devoted to freshwater ecology.
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Gudrun Ruud
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Gudrun Marie Ruud was a Norwegian zoologist and educator. She is remembered for her pioneering embryological research based on experimentation with salamanders. Early life Born in Christiania, Ruud was the youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant, I.A. Ruud. She enjoyed a pleasant childhood in a large property with geese and poultry on the grounds. From an early age, she was attracted by the birds, animals and plants she encountered during her holidays in Østre Aker, just outside the capital. She first attended a teacher training establishment before embarking on science studies at the Royal Frederick University, graduating in 1913.
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Katherine Bitting
1869 - 1937 (68 years)
Katherine Golden Bitting was a food chemist for the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Canners Association. She was a prolific author on the topic of food preservation. To facilitate her investigations, as the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress states, she collected "materials on the sources, preparation, and consumption of foods, their chemistry, bacteriology, preservations, etc., from earliest times to the present day." She and her husband, Arvril Bitting, donated a significant collection of materials related to cookery to the Library of Congress. The Bitting...
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Maria Skalińska
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Maria Skalińska was a Polish botanist and professor who studied plant anatomy and cell biology, particularly the plants of the Tatra mountains. She was the first to describe the species Poa nobilis.
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Elise L'Esperance
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Elise Depew Strang L'Esperance was an American pathologist and physician, a pioneer in establishing a preventive model of cancer treatment. She was a pathologist noted for establishing cancer prevention clinics in New York. She founded two clinics: the Strang Tumor Clinic in 1932 and the Strang Cancer Prevention Clinic in 1937, which operated out of the New York Infirmary. In 1940, L'Esperance opened a second branch of the Strang Cancer Prevention Clinic at the Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases. During her medical career, L'Esperance published her research prolifically, credited ...
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Annette Frances Braun
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Annette Frances Braun was an American entomologist and leading authority on microlepidoptera, a grouping of mostly small and nocturnal moths. Her special interest was leaf miners: moths whose larvae live and feed from within a leaf.
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Henrietta Hooker
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Henrietta Edgecomb Hooker was an American botanist and professor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . She was the second female doctoral graduate in botany at Syracuse University, which made her one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in botany from any U.S. university.
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Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
Hanna Marie Resvoll-Holmsen was a Norwegian botanist – a female pioneer in Norwegian natural history education and nature conservation together with her sister, Thekla Resvoll. Life Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen suffered much from illness in her childhood and school attendance after her 12th year was sporadic. She took a high school exam in 1902, at which time she had also an unhappy marriage behind her. She studied natural history at the Royal Frederik's University in Kristiania and graduated in botany in 1910. From 1921, she was docent in plant geography at the same university, a position she held...
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Lois Lampe
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Lois Lampe was an American botanist and educator. She taught at various levels for nearly 50 years at the Ohio State University before retiring and becoming assistant professor emerita in 1966. She was a member of six scientific societies and four honors societies during her teaching career.
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Fanny Langdon
1864 - 1899 (35 years)
Fanny E. Langdon was an American zoologist known for her work with invertebrate sensory organs and nervous systems. Langdon was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire and attended a normal school, teaching for three years in New Hampshire before pursuing undergraduate studies in zoology and botany at the University of Michigan in 1891. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1896 and her master's degree in 1897. After earning her degrees, she became an instructor in botany and zoology at the University of Michigan, and researched at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1897. ...
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Carlotta Case Hall
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Carlotta Case Hall was an American botanist and university professor who collected and published on ferns. She also co-authored a handbook on the plants of Yosemite National Park. Biography Carlotta Hall was born in Kingsville, Ohio, in 1880 to Adelaide Percy Case and Quincy A. Case. She studied botany at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in 1904. In 1910 she married the botanist Harvey Monroe Hall, with whom she had a daughter, Martha, in 1916.
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Mathilde Carmen Hertz
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Mathilde Carmen Hertz was a biologist, and was one of the first influential women scientists in the field of biology and a pioneer in the field of comparative psychology. Working in Germany, her career started to unravel in 1933 due to her Jewish ancestry. She was the younger daughter of the famous physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.
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Mary Alice Willcox
1856 - 1953 (97 years)
Mary Alice Willcox was an American zoologist and professor at Wellesley College. Early life and education In 1856, Mary was born in Kennebunk, Maine, the eldest of three children of the congregational minister William H. Willcox and his wife Annie Holmes née Goodenow. Theirs was a distinguished family in Maine; her great grandfather, John Holmes, was one of the state's first senators, while her grandfather, Daniel Goodenow, was justice of the Supreme Court of Maine. Her brother, Walter Francis Willcox, became professor of economics and statistics at Cornell University.
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Chiara Cirelli
#3649
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell was an American entomologist and high school biology teacher who discovered and collected a large number of insect specimens and other organisms. She participated in numerous research and collecting field trips including the Cockerell-Mackie-Ogilvie expedition. She wrote several scientific articles in her own right, co-authored more with her husband, Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, and assisted him with his prolific scientific output. She discovered and cultivated red sunflowers, eventually selling the seeds to commercial seed companies. Her husband and her entomologi...
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Norah Lillian Penston
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Norah Lillian Penston was a British botanist and academic administrator. She was principal of Bedford College, University of London, from 1951 to 1964. Early life and education Nora Penston was the daughter of A. J. Penston. She was educated at the Bolton School and St Anne's College, Oxford where she obtained a BA in botany in 1927. She studied under W. O. James, researching the potassium nutrition of potatoes for her DPhil, which she gained in 1930.
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