Carroll William Dodge

Carroll William Dodge (January 20, 1895 – July 21, 1988) was an American mycologist and lichenologist. His major fields of study included human and mammalian parasitic fungi, lichen-associated fungi, and fungi forming subterranean sporophores. His research and publications on Antarctic lichens were substantial, but not well received by the taxonomic community.

Biography Early life and education Carroll William Dodge was born in Danby, Vermont. He started his early education from Burr and Burton Seminaries in Manchester, Vermont. He went to Middlebury College at Vermont to study classical language and there he received his Artium Baccalaureus in 1915 and completed his master's in 1916. During his stay at Middlebury, he came in contact with Edward Angus Burt (1859–1939) who was another mycologist, today known as an authority of terrestrial fungi, Thelephoraceae. Carroll was inspired by Burt and his interest grew in biology; he followed Burt to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri as a Lachland Fellow. He was so interested in botany that he left Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, withdrew his nomination and went to Washington University to complete his doctorate. He did his PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry under Benjamin M. Duggar in 1918. During his stay in Harvard, from the mid-1920s he started studying fungal diseases in human and collected a lot of information such that he offered the first course in medical mycology in America. In 1931, Dodge was head of the International Association of Plant Taxonomists Section on Lichens. That year, he became professor of botany at Washington University. Gaspe Peninsula, Venezuela, Brazil, Tonga, Chile, Kerguelen Island, and New Zealand.

He was funded by National science museum for his trip to Antarctica in 1961. He studied lichens for several years in Antarctica and published a book Lichen Flora of the Antarctic Continent and Adjacent Islands in 1973. The book, however, was not well-received by his contemporaries. In one review of a later publication on Antarctic lichens, a reviewer described Dodge's "idiosyncratic monograph" as "for its users, more a source of frustration than information". In a critical revision of lichens described by Dodge in that 1973 publication, Miris Castello and Pier Luigi Nimis concluded that only about 20% of the approximately 150 species he described in that work were still accepted as valid. Gauiteria, Arcangeliella, Gymnomyces and Macromanites, Leucogastor and Leucophlebs were found during his early academic life.

Awards and affiliations Dodge's honors include: election to Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Gamma Alpha (National Councilor, 1923–1928; National Secretary, 1927); doctorates by the Universidad Nacional de Guatemala (1942) and the Universidad Nacional de Chile (1950); perpetual honorary member of the Societe Linneenne de Lyon, and the American Microscopical Society (and Centennial Award, 1978). He received the medal of the Society of Medical Mycologists of the Americas in 1976.