Lekh Raj Batra

Lekh Raj Batra (26 November 1929 – 20 May 1999) was a distinguished mycologist and linguist. He served as an editor and edited four books and two volumes of a journal. He traveled the world before retirement in search of unknown fungi, discovering 38 new fungal species and 7 fungal diseases. He collaborated with wife Suzanne in studying fungus-cultivating insects, with their overview appearing in Scientific American in 1967. Batra was writing an autobiography, with a focus on his Indus Valley boyhood, but this was not complete when he died in 1999.