Effie Almira Southworth

Effie Almira Southworth Spalding (1860–1947), was an American botanist and mycologist, and the first woman plant pathologist hired by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Her most important discovery was the 1887 identification of the fungus Colletotrichum gossypii as the cause of cotton cankers, a disease which killed thousands of acres of cotton and was a major economic threat. She taught botany at several institutions, worked at the Desert Botanical Laboratory with her husband, and established the Botany Department Herbarium at the University of Southern California.

Life Effie Southworth was born in North Collins, New York, on October 29, 1860, to parents Chloe and Nathaniel Southworth. Southworth was well educated and through her college years she studied foreign languages, mathematics, zoology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, botany, and physiology. She studied at Allegheny College for one year before transferring to the University of Michigan, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1885. In 1895, she married botanist Volney Morgan Spalding, a professor at the University of Michigan. After her husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis, they moved from Arizona to California where he died in 1918. In 1922, at the age of 65, she received her master's degree in botany from University of Southern California.

Career In 1885, Southworth became an instructor of botany at Bryn Mawr College. During her two years at the college, she also joined the botanical laboratory as a Fellow, worked on the anatomical structure of plants, and was able to understand the development of the fungus Asteroma. She is commemorated in the fungal genus Southworthia , which is now a synonym for Myriangium floridanum .