Lois Clark

Lois Clark (December 11, 1884 – December 30, 1967) was an American botanist, bryologist, and professor who studied plants of the Northwestern United States, particularly the genus Frullania. She taught at the University of Idaho and the University of Washington. Early life and education Lois Clark was born in Charlotte, Michigan, in 1884. Very shortly after her birth, Clark's family moved to Seattle, Washington, where Clark spent the majority of her life in the Pacific Northwest until her death in 1967.

Clark began her academic career by being educated through the Seattle Public Schools from 1898 to 1903. Afterwards, under the careful guidance of T.C. Frye, a renowned byrologist, Clark earned her bachelor's degree in 1907 from the University of Washington. In 1907, Clark became a graduate student at Yale University in order to study and learn from A. W. Evans, a heptaicologist well known in the scientific community. Clark remained at Yale for a year (1917-1918) and after became a botany student and assistant to the University of Minnesota. Upon the completion of her dissertation, which outlined the embryology of Podo- phyllum peltatum, Clark received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1919. At the herbarium, Clark determined many of the Heptaicae at the University of Washington, a few of which she even collected from the wild herself. Clark also published thirty-five scientific articles in the field of botany on her own and co-published sixty similar articles along both Frye and Ruth Sivihla.

Heptaicae from Alaska Clark and Frye also received Heptaicae specimens from Alaska which they identified at the University of Washington and published an article in The Bryologist on their findings in June 1942. Many of their specimens that were collected were located far away from vehicle-travelled roads and roughly five miles away from sources of salt water. They also had difficulty processing the Alaskan biological material because they parties responsible, in their opinion, did not bother to separate larger plants from smaller ones and, "almost all of the collecting has been done by those who do not know a moss from a liverwort, and who were not primarily interested in bryophytes." Clark and Frye go on to describe the qualities that are desired for a good collector of Heptaicae in order to demonstrate the point that these samples were not collected carefully enough. They also go on to state in their article that since Alaska is so large, there are many more Heptaicae to be discovered and classified. Clark's work on the classification of Frullania was highly revered and respected amongst the scientific community.

Affiliations Sigma XI and the American Bryological Society claimed Lois Clark as a member. Clark was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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