20th-century American botanists

Martha_Christensen

Dr. Martha Christensen (born 4 January 1932, Ames, died 19 March 2017, Madison) was an American mycologist, botanist and educator known as an expert in fungal taxonomy and ecology, particularly for soil-dwelling fungi in the genera Aspergillus and Penicillium.

William_Culp_Darrah

William Culp Darrah (1909 – 1989) was an American professor of biology at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He also had an interest in, and published several works on, 19th-century photography.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, his was a specialist in paleobotany. Darrah was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well a member of Sigma Xi and the Botanical Society of America.As an authority on the history of photography, he authored several books about 19th-century photo processes and photographers. As part of his interest in early photography, he assembled a collection of over 60,000 cartes-de-visite, which is now held at Penn State University.
He died in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Isabella_Abbott

Isabella Aiona Abbott (June 20, 1919 – October 28, 2010) was an educator, phycologist, and ethnobotanist from Hawaii. The first native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in science, she became a leading expert on Pacific marine algae.

Philip_Hershkovitz

Philip Hershkovitz (12 October 1909 – 15 February 1997) was an American mammalogist. Born in Pittsburgh, he attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Michigan and lived in South America collecting mammals. In 1947, he was appointed a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and he continued to work there until his death. He published much on the mammals of the Neotropics, particularly primates and rodents, and described almost 70 new species and subspecies of mammals. About a dozen species have been named after him.

Ralph_L._Obendorf

Ralph Louis Obendorf (born July 11, 1938) is an Emeritus Professor of Crop Physiology at Cornell University who is notable for his research on the health-related components in seeds, particularly fagopyritol A1, which is isosteric to an insulin mediator believed to be deficient in subjects with non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM or type II diabetes) and polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects 10% of women of reproductive age.