Ashley Lowndes

Ashley Gordon Lowndes (9 October 1885 – 15 March 1956) was a British zoologist and science teacher. He was known for developing a high-speed photomicrography, which was useful for studying cell movements and for which he received a research fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust. He was best remembered as an inspiring teacher whose students became notable scientists including John Zachary Young, Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, and Brian J. Ford.

Richard Dawkins, whose father Clinton John Dawkins was once a student of Lowndes at Marlborough, described him as a "legendary teacher".

Biography Lowndes was born at Cainscross Villa, Cainscross, Gloucestershire, to Robert Baxter Lowndes, a solicitor, and his wife, Marian, née Whitaker. He had two brothers and two sisters. He attended private school in Cainscross. He was later employed in the analytical staff of Nobel Industries as a chemist. flagellar movement in protists, and locomotion in fishes. He described several new species including Cyclops lacunae (1926), Cyclops latipes (1927), and Candona wedgwoodii (1932).

Lowndes was awarded research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust in 1934 for his research on micrography. Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and Fellow of the Geological Society of London. He was also awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) by the University of Cambridge.

Lowndes was lauded as a "brilliant teacher" at Marlborough. One of his first students, John Zachary Young, known as "the most distinguished invertebrate anatomist of this [20th] century," writing his obituary in Nature commented him as: "It must be more than an accident that so many of them have proved to be successful investigators and teachers."