Joseph Andorfer Ewan

Joseph Andorfer Ewan (1909–1999) was an American botanist, naturalist, and historian of botany and natural history.

Biography Joseph Ewan grew up in Los Angeles and developed an early interest in the study of nature. At the age of eighteen, he published an ornithological report in The Condor. He matriculated at UCLA and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1933, graduating there with a B.A. in 1934. After graduating he remained at Berkeley until 1937 as a research assistant to Willis Jepson. In 1935 Ewan married a fellow botanical student, Ada Nesta Dunn (1908–2000), in Reno, Nevada. She often collaborated with him on their publications. He was from 1937 to 1944 an instructor at the University of Colorado, from 1944 to 1945 a botanist with the Foreign Economic Administration, from 1945 to 1946 an assistant curator at the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1946 to 1947 an associate botanist at the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry. At Tulane University he became in 1947 an assistant professor and was eventually promoted to associate professor, and then full professor. There he held the Ida Richard Professorship from 1972 to 1977, when he retired as professor emeritus. a Biographical dictionary of Rocky Mountain naturalists (1981), and Benjamin Smith Barton: naturalist and physician in Jeffersonian America (published posthumously in 2007).