Adele L. Grant
American botanist (1881-1969)
Adele Gerard Lewis Grant (June 3, 1881 – June 19, 1969) was an American botanist, academic, and plant collector. She founded the Prytanean Women's Honor Society, the first U.S. collegiate honor society for women, and Sigma Delta Epsilon, a scientific fraternity for women graduate students which survives as the national organization Graduate Women in Science.
Early life
Adele Gerard Lewis was born in Carpinteria, California in 1881. Her parents were Rebecca and Henry Lewis, a wealthy farmer and rancher in Capinteria. She had three siblings and several half-siblings from her father's previous marriages.
She attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with B.S. degrees in chemistry and zoology in May 1903. While at Berkeley, she founded and was the first president of the Prytanean Women's Honor Society, with faculty advisor Mary Bennett Ritter, in the fall of 1900. This was the first women's collegiate honor society in the United States. Following her vision, the group raised money to start student healthcare program and a loan fund for female students.
She continued with her studies, enrolling in the Henry Shaw School of Botany at Washington University in St.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adele L. Grant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.