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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#3751

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.

#3752

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.

#3753

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.

#3754

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.

#3755

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.

#3756

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.

#3757

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.

#3758

Maria von Linden

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.

#3759

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.

#3760

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.

#3761

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.

#3762

Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya

1897 - 1970 (73 years)

Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya was a Soviet botanist, professor, and herbarium curator. She described over 100 plants.

#3763

Kathleen E. Carpenter

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.

#3764

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.

#3765

Katherine Bitting

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...

#3766

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.

#3767

Elise L'Esperance

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 ...

#3768

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.

#3769

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.

#3770

Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen

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...

#3771

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.

#3772

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. ...

#3773

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.

#3774

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.

#3775

Elva Lawton

1896 - 1993 (97 years)

Elva Lawton was an American botanist and bryologist known for her research on ferns early in her career and her late-career comprehensive study of the mosses of the Western United States. Early life and education Elva Lawton was born in West Middletown, Pennsylvania on April 3, 1896. Prior to matriculating at university, she was an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1919. She attended the University of Pittsburgh for her bachelor's degree, which she earned in 1923, and her master's degree, which she earned in 1925. From 1923 to 1925 she was also a high school biology and Latin teacher in Crafton, Pennsylvania.

#3776

Ida Maclean

1877 - 1944 (67 years)

Ida Smedley Maclean was an English biochemist and the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society. Early life and education Ida was born in Birmingham to William Smedley, a businessman, and Annie Elizabeth Duckworth. She was taught by her mother at home until the age of nine and lived in "a cultured and progressive home". She was educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham from 1886 to 1896, when she won a scholarship and began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge. In the university's Natural Sciences Tripos she got a first class in part one and a second class in part two, studying chemistry and physiology.

#3777

Edith Grace White

1890 - 1975 (85 years)

Edith Grace White was an American zoologist known for her studies of elasmobranchs . She was a professor of biology at Wilson College, and was a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

#3778

Gladys Dick

1881 - 1963 (82 years)

Gladys Rowena Henry Dick was an American physician who co-developed an antitoxin and vaccine for scarlet fever with her husband, George F. Dick. Biography Gladys Rowena Henry was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska in 1881 and earned her B.S. in zoology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1900. She was a member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Nebraska. Because her mother initially objected to Gladys attending medical school, she took graduate classes at Nebraska until 1903, then moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Graduated in 1907 with her M.D., she then trained for a year at the University of Berlin.

#3779

Mary Sophie Young

1872 - 1919 (47 years)

Mary Sophie Young was a botanist at the University of Texas significant for her field trips where she collected large quantities of specimens making her a key contributor to plant taxonomy in Texas.

#3780

Erna Mohr

1894 - 1968 (74 years)

Erna W. Mohr was a German zoologist who made contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy. Mohr was long associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she was successively head of the Fish Biology Department, Department of Higher Vertebrates, and Curator of the Vertebrate Department. She was a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and held an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich.

#3781

Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew

Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew

1912 - 1985 (73 years)

Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew was an American botanist dedicated to the study of plant systematics. Early life Bartholomew was born on June 14, 1912, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Influenced by her naturalist father, she became interested in the natural sciences at a young age. When she was 12 Bartholomew joined the Girl Scouts, and she subsequently earned all of the nature badges. After high school, Bartholomew attended West Virginia University. She became interested in botany during her freshman year after taking a class taught by Perry Daniel Strausbaugh.

#3782

Marian E. Hubbard

1868 - 1956 (88 years)

Marian Elizabeth Hubbard was an American zoologist and associate professor of zoology at Wellesley College, where she taught for over 40 years. Early life Marian Elizabeth Hubbard was born in McGregor, Iowa, to parents Rodolphus and Hanna Hubbard, In 1886 she graduated from McGregor school. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary until 1889 and graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.S. in 1894.

#3783

Portia Holman

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Portia Grenfell Holman was an Australian child psychiatrist who practiced in London. Early life and education Holman was born in 1903 in Sydney; she was the only child of William Holman, who would become the Premier of New South Wales, and Ada Augusta Holman, a writer. She gained a Bachelor of Arts at The Women's College of the University of Sydney, and in 1923 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in economics in 1926. She then went on to study at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics, before taking up a role in lecturing and research at the University of St Andrews from 1927 to 1933.

#3784

Mary Welleck Garretson

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.

#3785

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...

#3786

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.

#3787

Helena Krzemieniewska

1878 - 1966 (88 years)

Helena Krzemieniewska was a Polish botanist and microbiologist, noted for studying myxobacteria and myxophyta in soil. Works

#3788

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.

#3789

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 ...

#3790

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.

#3791

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.

#3792

Lillien Jane Martin

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.

#3793

Lilias Armstrong

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.

#3794

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.

#3795

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...

#3796

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.

#3797

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.

#3798

Kathleen Bever Blackburn

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.

#3799

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.

#3800

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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