Annakkili Amma Research Institute (AARI)

Prof. George Papenfuss      The South African-born phycologist, Prof. George Papenfuss spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Papenfuss was a student at the University of Cape Town before moving to the United States in 1926. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, which greatly improved his communication in English, he later enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, for the agricultural program. Papenfuss began to specialize in phycology at this time and completed a doctoral thesis on the life history of the brown algae Ectocarpus, in 1933.       The same year he married fellow graduate student 'Emma Johnstone' and spent 1934-1935 studying marine algae at the universities of Lund and Uppsala in Sweden, with phycologist Harald Kylin and Nils Svedelius. In Sweden, he became especially interested in South African phycology and in 1935 returned to Cape Town, his home country to study brown algae...

Prof. Michael Neushul Jr.  Prof. Michael Neushul Jr. was a quick-witted man of boundless enthusiasm and imagination, Mike was a font of new ideas and ingenious devices. During his career, Neushul attempted topics ranging from ecology to ultrastructure, extending both micro and macroalgae, but his special interest remained in Macrocystis.  Born in Shanghai, China in 1933 - where his father was a Pilot and businessman- Mike settled in California but traveled the seven continents. He entered the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) intended to become an elementary school teacher. But his lifelong interest in marine plants was ignited in Arthur Haupt's botany course at UCLA. Through Haupt, he met renowned algologist E. Yale Dawson, who inspired Mike to enter the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and study the growth and reproduction of giant kelp with Francis Haxo. Dawson and Mike worked together on the distribution and taxonomy of marine algae in southern California ...

 Scientist of the Week August 2021 Prof. Joanna M. Kain     Prof.  Joanna M. Kain was a New Zealand-born British Phycologist. She was born in 1930 to an English mother and a Kiwi father and moved to London at the age of 2 and spent most of her life in the UK. Her father named her Dorothy Kain, which her mother never liked, and thus re-named her as Joanna - after her favorite doll - by this name she was known to the Phycologist world over, Joanna Jones (Kain).      Although her early education was disrupted with moves to 10 different schools, she eventually made it to University College London in 1949, where she became attracted to seaweeds under the influence of  Prof. G E Fogg. Her undergraduate research project was on patterns of intertidal zonation around the Isle of Wight. She was particularly interested in intertidal ecology, but the Institute of Seaweed Research, offered her a research problem to investigate the growth of marine phytoplankt...

 Peter Stanley Dixon      Peter Stanley Dixon was born in Redcar, England on 29 November 1928. He was the only child of William Stanley and Nellie Dixon. He came from a poor family and completed his entire education with the help of various scholarships. He continued his education at the University of Manchester from where he received a B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. Here he developed a strong foundation in what was then widely referred to as cryptogamic botany. However, upon completing his B.Sc., he turned his attention towards a group of organisms (Red Algae), that would dominate the rest of his life. His MSc thesis was on cytology and reproduction in freshwater red alga Lemanea . This has set the stage for further graduate work under the able mentorship of Kathleen M. Drew-Baker. He chooses to work on Gelidium and its relatives, a red algal group notorious for its taxonomic difficulty.            In 1954 he began his academic career...