Edward J. Russell

Sir Edward John Russell (31 October 1872 – 12 July 1965) was a British soil chemist, agriculture scientist, and director of Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1912 to 1943. He was responsible for hiring R. A. Fisher for statistical research at Rothamsted and driven by concerns over a lack of international information exchange about agriculture, he initiated the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux, which later became the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.

Biography Russell was born at Frampton-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, the eldest son of the Reverend Edward T. Russell who had worked earlier as a schoolmaster. In 1885 he studied at Birmingham where the family moved before relocating the next year to London. He was educated at Carmarthen Presbyterian College; University College of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Victoria University of Manchester, and in 1902 earned his Doctor of Science in chemistry from the University of London. He was knighted in 1922. In 1920 he wrote the obituary of chemist Percival Spencer Umfreville Pickering.

Russell was president of the British Association for 1948–1949. He married Elnor Oldham of Manchester in 1903 and they had six children of whom one son, Walter, became a soil physicist at Rothamsted. He is buried, with his wife, in the churchyard of St Nicholas in Harpenden.

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