Frank Lincoln Stevens

Frank Lincoln Stevens (April 1, 1871, Onondaga County, New York – August 18, 1934, Winnetka, Illinois) was an American mycologist and phytopathologist. He gained an international reputation as one of the preeminent mycologists.

Biography Frank Lincoln Stevens grew up on a farm near Syracuse, New York. He received secondary education at Onondaga Academy. In his boyhood and teenage years he read about science, created a homemade laboratory, and made, within Onondaga County, comprehensive collections of ferns and geological specimens. Without any formal instruction in chemistry, he passed examinations in chemistry at the high school level. With advice from David Grandison Fairchild, whom he encountered at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, Stevens matriculated at Rutgers University to study botany and, especially, plant pathology. (1867–1937). She became the first woman faculty member at North Carolina State when she taught biology there from 1902 to 1903. She was the coauthor, with her husband and with Tait Butler (1862–1939), of A Practical Arithmetic (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909).

Frank L. Stevens taught science at Racine College from 1893 to 1894, taught chemistry and botany at Central High School in Columbus, Ohio from 1894 to 1897, and worked as a sanitary analyst for the Chicago Drainage Canal Investigation from 1899 to 1900. and the important textbook Diseases of Economic Plants (Macmillan, 1910). While a professor in North Carolina, he collected with John Galentine Hall (1870–1949). and Nathaniel Lord Britton.

In Puerto Rico, the collection by Stevens from 1912 to 1914 of rusts (fungi in the order Pucciniales, previously known as Uredinales) made a valuable contribution to tropical mycology. In his collection there are 620 numbers of material collected in 1913, 23 collected in 1912, and 7 collected in January 1914. The collection has 18 rust species that were new to science.

At the University of Illinois, Stevens was a professor of plant pathology from 1914 until his death in 1934. During his Illinois professorship he collected in Guyana, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

He was elected in 1899 a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the president of the American Phytopathological Society in 1910.