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.
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#3601
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 Welleck Garretson
1896 - 1971 (75 years)
Mary Welleck Garretson was an American geologist. Garretson had a passion for teaching earlier in her career, obtaining her first job at the Young Men's Christian Association . From 1921 to 1923, she instructed an introductory geology course, which happened to be the first geology course conducted through this institution. Garretson was subsequently employed as a consultant within the fields of paleontology and stratigraphy.
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Kitty Ponse
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Kitty Ponse was a Swiss zoologist and endocrinologist. She was a professor at the University of Geneva and received the Swiss Otto Naegeli Prize in 1961. Life and career Ponse was born in Sumatra, then part of the Dutch East Indies, to Dutch parents in 1897. At the age of eight she and her family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she later studied science at the University of Geneva. She completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva in 1922 that focused on embryological development. While the focus of her earlier research and publications was pure zoology, including tail regenerat...
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Helen Jean Brown
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Dr. Helen Jean Bromley was an American botanist and phycologist noted for her study of the algal family Vaucheriaceae. She earned her PhD from Ohio State University, in 1929. She published using her maiden name, and served as both an instructor of botany and registrar at the University of Connecticut. She was married to entomologist Stanley Willard Bromley.
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Helena Krzemieniewska
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Helena Krzemieniewska was a Polish botanist and microbiologist, noted for studying myxobacteria and myxophyta in soil. Works
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Regina Kapeller-Adler
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Regina Kapeller-Adler, born Regina Kapeller, was an Austrian biochemist who, in 1934, devised an innovative test for early pregnancy based on the detection of histidine in urine. As a Jew, she was forced to leave Austria following the country's annexation into Nazi Germany in the Anschluss and went to work with the noted geneticist Francis Crew at the Institute of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.
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Kathleen Sampson
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Kathleen Sampson was an English mycologist and plant pathologist, with a focus in herbage crops and cereal diseases. She was a leading authority on smut fungi growing in the British Isles. Early life Sampson was born on 23 November 1892 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She received her Bachelor of Science from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 1914. During her study Sampson was awarded the London University Gilchrist Scholarship for Women in 1913, and the Driver Scholarship for Botany in 1914 as well as being awarded the Driver essay prize in 1914. She graduated with her Masters in ...
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Margery Knight
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Margery Knight was an algologist, artist and lecturer at the Port Erin Marine Biological Station, University of Liverpool. Career Knight was a lecturer in botany at University of Liverpool from 1912 until she retired in 1954. She was based at the University’s Port Erin Marine Biological Station on the Isle of Man.
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Clara Lynch
1882 - 1985 (103 years)
Clara J. Lynch was an American biologist and cancer researcher, who notably pioneered the use of the Swiss laboratory mouse in cancer research. Background Clara Lynch was born on March 6, 1882, in Canton, Ohio, and died on December 8, 1985, in Arlington, Virginia, at the age of 103. She never married but did have two nieces named Marcia and Eliza Miller. Lynch was born to her parents William A. Lynch and Eliza R. Underhill. Her father was a prominent attorney during his time. Lynch had two other siblings named Alice Allen Lynch and Frances H. Lynch, both of whom also lived to adulthood.
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Lillien Jane Martin
1851 - 1943 (92 years)
Lillien Jane Martin was an American psychologist. She published over twelve books. Martin experienced ageism and sexism as an early woman in psychology. Early life and education Lillien Jane Martin was born on July 7, 1851, at Olean, New York. At the age of four, she entered the nearby Olean Academy. At the age of sixteen, her talents were recognized such that she became a teacher at a girls' school in Wisconsin. By the age of 26, in 1876, she had earned enough money to return to her native New York where she enrolled at Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Lilias Armstrong
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.
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Winifred Josephine Robinson
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Winifred Josephine Robinson was an American botanist, educator, and educational administrator. As a botanist, she studied ferns and wrote several papers and books. She was the first dean of the Women's College of the University of Delaware, which was founded in 1914.
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Ida Kraus Ragins
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Ida Kraus Ragins, née Kraus , was a Russian Empire-born American biochemist. Life and work Ida Kraus Ragins was born in the Russian Empire and moved to the United States before 1915. That year she started work as an assistant in quantitative analysis in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Chicago, possibly as a student job, as she received her B.A. in 1918 and her M.S. from the university the following year. Kraus Ragins taught for a year at the Oklahoma College for Women, before returning to Chicago to work on her Ph.D. which she received in 1924. She then worked as an instructor...
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Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock
1851 - 1936 (85 years)
Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock was one of only 13 American women to receive their doctorates in chemistry during the 19th-century, and was the first woman to receive a doctorate in Philosophy of Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Sarah P. Monks
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Sarah Preston Monks was an American naturalist, educator, scientific illustrator, and poet, based for much of her career in San Pedro, California. Monks was the first zoology instructor at Los Angeles State Normal School, a precursor to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for over 20 years, and published on diverse topics including reptiles, amphibians, spiders, and marine biology.
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Kathleen Bever Blackburn
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Kathleen Bever Blackburn, was a British botanist best remembered for the 1923 discovery that plant cells have sex chromosomes. Her principal contributions were in plant cytology and genetics. She was also a pioneer of pollen analysis. She taught botany at Armstrong College, Durham University from 1918 to 1957.
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Mathilde Lange
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Mathilde Margarethe Lange was an American biologist known for her research in experimental embryology. She was born in New York City and her father was a physician and surgeon. She attended the University of Zurich and earned her Ph.D. in 1920. She was employed by the United States Department of Agriculture for the first year following her Ph.D. as a researcher. Lange then moved to Wheaton College, Massachusetts as a professor of zoology, where she remained until her retirement in 1950. Her professional memberships included the New York Academy of Growth and the Genetic Association.
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Carrie Adeline Barbour
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Carrie Adeline Barbour was an American paleontologist and educator. As an assistant curator of paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum and an Assistant Professor of Paleontology, Barbour was among the earliest women paleontologists in the United States.
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Julia Warner Snow
1863 - 1927 (64 years)
Julia Warner Snow was an American botanist and was known in the scientific community for her work as a systematic phycologist. Snow was born in La Salle, Illinois, the third child of Norman G. Snow and Charlotte D. . At the age of sixteen she left La Salle to enter Hungerford Collegiate Institute, Adams, New York. After graduating in 1880, she returned home to live with her parents, then in 1884 matriculated to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While an undergraduate, she joined the Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity. When the Sigma Xi honor society was formed at Cornell in 1886, Julia joined along with fellow Theta Anna Botsford Comstock.
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Ida Shepard Oldroyd
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Ida Shepard Oldroyd was an American conchologist and Curator of Geology at Stanford University for over 20 years, who curated what was for a time the second largest collection of mollusk shells in the world. Oldroyd and her husband, Tom Shaw Oldroyd, amassed one of the largest private shell collections in California. Ida was recognized as an active and early pioneer of conchology in the western United States. She was a charter member of the American Malacological Union, of which she served as vice-president in 1934 and as honorary president from 1935 to 1940.
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Wanda Kirkbride Farr
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Wanda K. Farr was an American botanist known for her discovery of the mechanism by which cellulose is formed in the walls of plant cells. Early life Wanda Farr was born near New Matamoras, Ohio on January 9, 1895, to parents Frederick Alonzo Kirkbride and Clara M Nikolaus. When she was four years old, her father died and she and her mother went to live with Wanda's grandparents in New Matamoras. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Samuel Richardson, was a physician who lived in the same town. He helped cultivate her interest in science, in particular in plants and growing things.
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Helen Riaboff Whiteley
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Helen Riaboff Whiteley was a microbiologist who spent most of her research career at the University of Washington. Early life and education Whiteley was born in 1921 to Russian parents in Harbin, China. The family immigrated to the United States in 1924, first settling in Washington and later moving to California. Whiteley studied microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her B.S. in 1941. She then earned a master's degree from the University of Texas, Galveston and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, where her husband Arthur Whiteley was at the time an assistant professor of zoology.
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Betty Batham
1917 - 1974 (57 years)
Elizabeth Joan Batham was a New Zealand marine biologist and university lecturer. A past president of the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Batham directed the Portobello Marine Biological Station at the University of Otago for more than 23 years.
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LaDema Langdon
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
LaDema Mary Langdon was an American botanist known for her work on floral anatomy, taxonomy, embryology, and morphology of Juglandaceae, Fagaceae, Cycas, and Dioon spinulosum. She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a professor at Baltimore Junior College and Goucher College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.
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Eleanor Carothers
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Estrella Eleanor Carothers , known primarily as Eleanor Carothers, was an American zoologist, geneticist, and cytologist known for her work with grasshoppers. She discovered important physical evidence for the concept of independent assortment, vital to modern understanding of genetics.
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Margaret Altmann
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Margaret Altmann was a German-American biologist focusing on animal husbandry and psychobiology. She was one of the first women to work in the psychobiology, ethology and animal husbandry fields, with a focus on livestock.
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Johanna Westerdijk
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Johanna Westerdijk was a Dutch plant pathologist and the first female professor in the Netherlands. Early life Johanna Westerdijk, called "Hans" by friends, was born on 4 January 1883 in Nieuwer-Amstel, a small village south of Amsterdam, and died on 15 November 1961 at 78 years old in Baarn, Netherlands.
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Carrie Derick
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Carrie Matilda Derick was a Canadian botanist and geneticist, the first female professor in a Canadian university, and the founder of McGill University's genetics department. Early life and education Born in the Eastern Townships in Clarenceville, Canada East in 1862, Derick was educated at the Clarenceville Academy . She began teaching by the age of fifteen. Derick later received teacher training at the McGill Normal School, graduating in 1881 as a Prince of Wales Gold Medal winner. She then went on to become a school teacher in Clarenceville and Montreal, and later serving as a principal ...
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Julia Bell
1879 - 1979 (100 years)
Julia Bell was a pioneering English human geneticist. Biography She attended Girton College in Cambridge and took the Mathematical Tripos exam in 1901. But because women could not officially receive degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, she was awarded a master's degree at Trinity College, Dublin for her work investigating solar parallax at Cambridge Observatory. In 1908, she moved to University College London and obtained a position there as an assistant in statistics.
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Ruth F. Allen
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Ruth Florence Allen was an American botanist and plant pathologist and the first woman to earn her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Wisconsin. Her doctorate research focused on the reproduction and cell biology of ferns, particularly the phenomenon of apogamy . Later in her career, Allen shifted her focus to plant pathology. Her major contribution to the field of mycology was furthering the understanding of rust fungi, a group of economically important plant pathogens. Allen completed many studies on Puccinia graminis, once considered a catastrophically damaging disease-causing agent i...
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Wilhelmine Key
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Wilhelmine "Minnie" Marie Enteman Key was an American geneticist. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, where she studied coloration in paper wasps. She contributed to the study of eugenics and was an influential teacher to Sewall Wright.
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Helen Dyer
1895 - 1998 (103 years)
Helen Marie Dyer was an American biochemist and cancer researcher. Her main work concerned the mechanism of carcinogenesis; she also worked with metabolism and nutrition. Life Dyer was born on 26 May 1895 to Florence Robertson Dyer and Joseph E. Dyer in Washington, D.C. Her father owned a wholesale grocery. She had three older siblings. As a young woman, she was uninterested in science; though she took science courses in high school, she was an accomplished athlete. She went to Western High School and was graduated in 1913. She credited her high school teachers for inspiring her scientific studies.
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Lily Newton
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Lily Newton was professor of botany and vice-principal at the University of Wales. Early life and education Newton was born at Pensford in Somerset in 1893, the daughter of George and Melinda Batten. She attended Colston’s Girls' School, Bristol, where she was captain of school. She studied botany at the University of Bristol, where she was awarded the Vincent Stuckey Lean scholarship in botany and graduated with a first class honours degree.
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Tatiana Dobrolyubova
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Tatiana Dobrolyubova was a Russian geologist and paleontologist. Life and work Tatiana Alekseevna Dobrolyubova was born in 1891 in Nizhegorod Province in the Russian Empire. She completed gymnasium in 1909 and was awarded a first-class diploma from the Moscow Higher Women's Courses in 1915. She trained as a teacher at the University of Moscow from 1920 and then became an assistant professor of geology there in January 1922. From 1921 to 1931 Dobrolyubova organized nine large geological survey expeditions to the northern Ural Mountains, but her interests gradually turned to paleontology rather than geology.
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Mary Parke
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Mary Winifred Parke, FRS, was a British marine botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society specialising in phycology, the study of algae. Scientific work Mary Parke contributed a great deal to the study of marine algae, publishing numerous articles on the subject. Her pioneering work on culturing algae in the laboratory may be considered her most significant contribution. She discovered that the flagellate Isochrysis galbana was ideal for feeding oyster larvae; cultures of this species are used for fish farming and in research laboratories throughout the world. Most researchers and fish farmers...
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Emily Ray Gregory
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Emily Ray Gregory was an American zoologist who is best known as holding the American Women's Table at the Naples Zoological Station and her work with the United States War Trade Board and the United States Treasury Department.
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Clara Eaton Cummings
1855 - 1906 (51 years)
Clara Eaton Cummings was an American cryptogamic botanist and Hunnewell Professor of Cryptogamic Botany at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Life and education Cummings was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on July 13, 1855 to Noah Conner and Elmira George Cummings. In 1876, she enrolled at the women's liberal arts college Wellesley, only one year after the opening of the institution.
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