Elisabeth A. Wheeler

Elisabeth A. Wheeler (born January 10, 1944) is an American biologist, botanist, and wood scientist, who is a Professor Emerita of the Department of Forest Biomaterials at the North Carolina State University. Her research work is in the area of wood anatomy (softwoods and hardwoods) and paleontology (late cretaceous and early tertiary fossil woods), Most of her research work has been jointly made with the Dutch botanist, Pieter Baas.

Education and research career Wheeler studied biology in the Reed College at Portland, Oregon, and got her BA in 1965. She did her MS studies in botany at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (1968-1970), and she continued with doctorate research in botany obtaining her PhD in 1972.

During the years 1972–1976, she worked as a curatorial assistant and honorary research fellow at the Bailey-Wetmore Laboratory of Plant Anatomy and Morphology at Harvard University. In 1976, Wheeler became an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in the Department of Wood and Paper Science, where she worked continually until 2008, when she retired as a full professor.

Wheeler has coordinated the NCSU initiative for the creation of the InsideWood, a purely-educational database containing thousands of wood anatomical descriptions and over 66,000 photomicrographs, and its free, open coverage is worldwide.

She is a member of the International Association of Wood Anatomists, the Botanical Society of America, and the International Organization of Paleobotany, and is a Fellow at the International Society of Wood Science and Technology. She served as a co-editor of the IAWA Journal, in cooperation with the then editor, Pieter Baas. In October 2023, a meta-research carried out by John Ioannidis et al. at the Stanford University included Wheeler in Elsevier Data 2022, where she was ranked at the top 2% of researchers of all time in forestry – paleontology. As of April 2026, Wheeler's research publications have been cited more than 9,000 times in Google Scholar (h-index: 48).

The standard author abbreviation Wheeler is used to indicate this scientist as the author, when citing a botanical name, e.g. Alangium oregonensis Scott & Wheeler.

Personal life She lives permanently in Raleigh, North Carolina.