stuckupteen:

me arriving late to your funeral

womenwhokickass:

Isabella Kauakea Yau Yung Aiona Abbott: Why she kicks ass

• She was an educator and ethnobotanist from Hawaii, who became the first Hawaiian woman to receive a Ph.D. in science, and the leading expert on Pacific algae. 
• She wrote eight books and over 150 publications on Hawaiian seaweed, from scientific reference guides to books about her ethnobotanical studies—which reveal that under the kapu system, women in ancient Hawaiian culture were the community’s seaweed harvesters. (Before her publications, no extensive resource existed on Hawaiian limu.)
• 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 has earned her the nickname “first lady of limu”.
• She was a professor emerita of the University of Hawaii, as well as Stanford University, where she taught for 32 years, and was the first female professor in the school’s biological sciences department.
• She grew up in Honolulu, and graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 1937. 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 from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.
• In 1960 she started teaching summer classes as a lecturer at Hopkins. She compiled a book on Marine algae of the Monterey peninsula, which later was expanded to include all of the California coast. In 1972 Stanford took the unusual step of promoting her directly to a full professor. In 1982 both Abbotts retired and moved back to Hawaii, where she was hired by the University of Hawaii to study ethnobotany, the interaction of humans and plants.
• In 1997 she received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources for her studies of coral reefs.
• She was the G. P. Wilder Professor of Botany from 1980 until her retirement, and then was professor emerita of Botany at the University of Hawaii. She served on the board of directors of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum.
• In November 1997 she co-authored an essay in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin criticizing the trustees of Kamehameha Schools, which led to its reorganization.
• In 2005, she was named a Living Treasure of Hawai’i.  Abbott died October 28, 2010 at the age of 91 at her home in Honolulu.