Prof. Isabella Aiona Abbott
Prof. Isabella Aiona Abbott, whose native Hawai'ian name was Isabella Kauakea (White Rain of Hana) Yau Yung Aiona was born on June 20, 1919. Her father was ethnically Chinese while her mother was a Native Hawaiian. Abbott was the only girl and second youngest in a family of eight siblings. She received her undergraduate degree in botany at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in 1941, a master's degree in botany from the University of Michigan in 1942, and a Ph.D. in botany from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. In that era, women with PhDs were scarce and faculty positions for them were even scarcer. She was the first Native Hawai’ian woman to earn a Ph.D. in science.
She married a zoologist Donald Putnam Abbott, who had been a fellow student at the University of Hawaii as well as Berkeley. The couple moved to Pacific Grove, California where her husband taught at the Hopkins Marine Station run by Stanford University. For the first few years, Abbott spent her time raising the couple's daughter, Annie, and involving herself in the local community. In 1960, she was hired as a lecturer in biology and began teaching summer courses at Hopkins and publishing scientific papers. Finally, in 1972, her productiveness as a researcher and effectiveness as a teacher were so undeniable that she was hired as a full professor in biology, bypassing the usual steps on the tenure-track ladder of first being an assistant, then associate, professor.
In 1976, she wrote Marine Algae of California, which is the definitive description of marine algae along the Pacific coast. She was considered the foremost authority on the algae of the Pacific Ocean basin. She authored eight books and over 150 publications. Abbott allowed her graduate students to explore their own research interests, rather than insisting they work on her topics, and as a result, had students working on a wide range of areas. Thus she provided a very supportive, almost nurturing, environment to all her students. She always had time to listen, had good advice, professional career advice. Besides this, the major contribution came in the form of Workshops she conducted entitled "Taxonomy of economic seaweeds" under California Sea Grant College Program. When I joined CSMCRI in 2001, I wrote to her expressing my willingness to participating in her next workshop, but she replied to me that these workshops are no more taking place as she retired - of course, I was sad to learn that, but kept corresponding with her and getting advice and literature on my work on the identification of Indian seaweed flora. She was considered the world's leading expert on Hawaiian seaweeds, known in the Hawaiian language as limu. She was credited with discovering over 200 species, with several named after her, including the Rhodomelaceae family (red algae) genus of Abbottella. This earned her the nickname "First Lady of Limu." In 2008 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources for her studies of coral reefs.
Abbott spent much time during her childhood learning about different kinds of edible seaweed. She would often go with her mother to the seashore to collect seaweed and use it to cook traditional Hawaiian dishes. She saw no line between her professional career and her cooking hobby. Instead of zucchini bread, she would show up with a nereocystis cake and it is hard-pressed to tell that it wasn't zucchini. She wrote a small book for a lay audience about "limu," the Hawaiian word for seaweeds, which continues to sell well, even today. The book contains both Hawaiian and scientific names, stories about limu collected around the islands, and, of course, some recipes. She was constantly innovating recipes to incorporate seaweeds.
She was the G. P. Wilder Professor of Botany from 1980 until her retirement in 1982, upon that she and her husband moved to Hawaii where she continued her research as the professor emerita of botany at the University of Hawaii. Here she began teaching Hawaiian ethnobotany; her efforts were so successful that they led to the development of an undergraduate major in the subject. She also served on the board of directors of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. In 1997, Abbott was awarded the Gilbert Morgan Smith medal, the highest award in marine botany, from the National Academy of Sciences.
This prolific phycologist died on October 28, 2010, at the age of 91 at her home in Honolulu. To preserve Abbott's legacy and career as a botanist, the University of Hawaii established a scholarship to support graduate research in Hawaiian ethnobotany and marine botany.
Data compiled by: Dr. Vaibhav A. Mantri, Principal Scientist & Divisional Chair, CSIR-CSMCRI, Bhavnagar, Gujarat, India.
Source Credit: Isabella Abbott, world-renowned Stanford algae expert: Stanford Report, December 7, 2010
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