Hannah Caroline Aase

Hannah Caroline Aase (July 12, 1883 – November 23, 1980) was an American botanist and cytologist.

Career Aase received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of South Dakota in 1906 and a graduate degree from South Dakota State College in 1928. In 1915, she received a PhD from the University of Chicago. In her 1915 dissertation, she studied the vascular anatomy of the megasporophylls of conifers. She found that plants in the Coniferales family generally reduce the number of sporophylls in the strobilus and a modified compound sporophyll appears later in disguised forms but loses one of the sporophyll members. She was a member of the faculty until 1949 and the first emeritus professor.

She later studied the heredity of cereal grains. She crossed wheat with wild relatives in the 1930s and seems to have wanted to understand the ancestry of wheat, but much of her work has been lost.

She often co-authored papers on Allium aaseae, Aase's Onion, with Francis Marion Ownbey, a fellow faculty member at WSU. After her retirement, she continued in the field by reading technical journals. Washington State University has honored her legacy with the Aase Fellowship in Botany which used in the recruitment of new graduate students.