Flora Wambaugh Patterson
| Flora Wambaugh Patterson | |
|---|---|
Patterson at microscope
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| Born | 1847 Columbus, Ohio |
| Died | 1928 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Plant pathologist |
Flora Wambaugh Patterson (1847–1928) was an American mycologist, and the first female plant pathologist hired by the United States Department of Agriculture. She ran the US National Fungus Collections for almost thirty years, radically growing the collection and shaping its direction, and supervised or discovered numerous significant fungal diseases.
Flora Wambaugh was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Sarah Sells (Wambaugh) and Methodist minister A. B. Wambaugh. She studied fungi as a hobby in her childhood. She attended Antioch College in Ohio, earning her bachelor's degree in 1865. She then earned two Master's degrees from Cincinnati Wesleyan College. Wambaugh married Captain Edwin Patterson in 1869, assuming his name, and they had two children; she worked to support the family financially. After his death Patterson continued her studies at the State University of Iowa, and in 1892 or 1893 made plans to transfer to Yale University. When Yale rejected her because she was a woman, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began studies at Radcliffe College, where she worked at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard.
In 1895, Patterson joined the USDA as a pathologist, hired by Beverly T. Galloway along with Franklin Sumner Earle. During her almost thirty-year tenure at the USDA, Patterson increased the size of the U.S. National Fungus Collections by almost six times, from 19,000 to 115,000 reference specimens. She identified numerous new species of fungus, including those causing pineapple rot (Thielaviopsis paradoxa), peach leaf curl (Taphrina), and "witches' broom" on bamboo (Loculistroma bambusae), which was an entirely new genus.
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