Ida Augusta Keller
American plant physiologist and teacher (1866-1932)
Ida Augusta Keller (June 11, 1866 – September 10, 1932) was an American plant physiologist and teacher in Philadelphia.
Early life and family
Ida Keller was born in on June 11, 1866 to William Charles Christian and Maria Augusta (née Cramer) Keller in Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse, while her parents were visiting their former home. She grew up in Philadelphia, where her father was a physician, and was graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1884.
She attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1884 to 1886; as the first woman to complete the two-year course in biology, she received a Certificate of Proficiency in Biology. (This institution did not grant degrees to women at the time.) After working as an assistant in the herbarium at Bryn Mawr College for a year, she attended the University of Leipzig for two years, studying chemistry with Friedrich Stohmann and plant physiology with Wilhelm Pfeffer. She did her doctoral work at the University of Zurich, studying with Arnold Dodel-Port (de). In 1890, on completion of her dissertation, titled Über Protoplasma-Strömung im Pflanzenreich (On Protoplasmic Flow in the Plant Kingdom), she received a PhD degree.
Ida had a brother, Harry Frederick Keller, who was educated as a chemist and also taught in Philadelphia public schools.
Career
After receiving her doctorate, Ida Keller returned to Bryn Mawr as lecturer in botany for two years. In 1893, she became a teacher of chemistry at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she herself had attended.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ida Augusta Keller” 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.