Helen A. Stafford

Helen Adele Stafford (August 9, 1922, Philadelphia – August 12, 2011, Portland, Oregon) was an American plant physiologist and phytochemist. She was from 1977 to 1978 the president of the Phytochemical Society of North America.

Biography Helen A. Stafford attended Quaker schools in Philadelphia.

She became an undergraduate at Wellesley College, where she graduated in 1944 with a B.A. in botany. For the academic year 1945–1946, she worked with orchid cultures as a research assistant to Lewis Knudson at Cornell University. In 1946 she transferred to the Connecticut College for Women. There she was supported by a two-year assistantship under the supervision of Richard H. Goodwin and graduated with an M.A. in botany. Her thesis research on timothy grass seedlings was published in 1948 in the American Journal of Botany. Stafford and Goodwin corresponded for many years after her graduation.

For three years from 1948 to 1951 she was a graduate student in the botany department of the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. under the supervision of David R. Goddard. The 1954 review established her as a leading expert on this subject. (1910–2001), who recruited her for Reed's biology department. When Stafford arrived in 1954 at Reed College, she was the first woman to join the faculty in the division of mathematics and natural sciences. She was the first Reed professor to win a Guggenheim fellowship. (who was the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. from Princeton University).

Stafford was the author or co-author of more than 70 scientific articles. For many years, her 1990 book Flavonoid Metabolism was a definitive text. During her career she was an outstanding teacher and role model for women scientists. USAAF Staff Sergeant Morton Ogden Stafford Jr. (1919–1943) was an aerial gunner killed in action when his aircraft was shot down in Romania. Helen Stafford's ashes were scattered in the Reed College Canyon,

Selected publications Articles

Books

(1st edition 1990)

(1st edition 1992) (1st edition 1993) (1st edition 1994)