Helen A. Stafford

Helen Adele Stafford (August 9, 1922, Philadelphia – August 12, 2011, Portland, Oregon) was an American plant physiologist and phytochemist. She was from 1977 to 1978 the president of the Phytochemical Society of North America.

Biography
Helen A. Stafford attended Quaker schools in Philadelphia. She became interested in botany when tending her father's garden.

She became an undergraduate at Wellesley College, where she graduated in 1944 with a B.A. in botany. For the academic year 1945–1946, she worked with orchid cultures as a research assistant to Lewis Knudson at Cornell University. In 1946 she transferred to the Connecticut College for Women. There she was supported by a two-year assistantship under the supervision of Richard H. Goodwin and graduated with an M.A. in botany. Her thesis research on timothy grass seedlings was published in 1948 in the American Journal of Botany. Stafford and Goodwin corresponded for many years after her graduation.

For three years from 1948 to 1951 she was a graduate student in the botany department of the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. under the supervision of David R. Goddard. However, due to institutional prejudice, Stafford was not allowed to teach male students. Stafford's doctoral dissertation was pioneering research on the cellular localization of plant enzymes by applying differential centrifugation to cell-free homogenates. From 1951 to 1954 she was a postdoc at the University of Chicago. There she was supervised by Birgit Vennesland and did research on "NAD+/NADP+ dependent dehydrogenases acting on hydroxy acids in plants". In 1954 the Annual Review of Plant Physiology published the review paper Location of enzymes in the cells of higher plants coauthored by Stafford and Goddard. The 1954 review established her as a leading expert on this subject.

Stafford's outstanding published research, as well as her teaching at the University of Chicago, impressed Reed College's Lewis Kleinholz (1910–2001), who recruited her for Reed's biology department. When Stafford arrived in 1954 at Reed College, she was the first woman to join the faculty in the division of mathematics and natural sciences. In Reed's biology department, she was an assistant professor from 1954 to 1959, an associate professor from 1959 to 1965, and a full professor from 1965 to 1987, when she retired as professor emerita. From 1958 to 1959 she was on academic leave of absence at Harvard University, with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship. She was the first Reed professor to win a Guggenheim fellowship. She spent sabbatical years at the University of California at Los Angeles, Yale University, and the Oregon Graduate Center. At the Oregon Graduate Center, she worked with T'Sai-Ying Cheng (who was the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. from Princeton University).

Stafford was the author or co-author of more than 70 scientific articles. She was an authority on the phytochemistry and plant physiology of flavonoids. For many years, her 1990 book Flavonoid Metabolism was a definitive text.

Helen Stafford served from 1964 to 1992 on the editorial board of Plant Physiology. From 1989 to 1993 she was editor-in-chief of the book series Recent Advances in Phytochemistry, published by Plenum Press. This book series was published for over 3 decades — presenting phytochemical research, especially for natural biochemical products produced by plants. In 1996 the American Society of Plant Physiologists (renamed in 2001 the American Society of Plant Biologists) honored her with the Charles Reid Barnes Life Membership Award. She was the first woman to receive the award. During her career she was an outstanding teacher and role model for women scientists.

Stafford died after struggling with Alzheimer's disease. She was predeceased by her parents, her brother, and her sister and survived by a niece. In her will, Helem Stafford endowed Reed College's Morton O. Stafford Jr. Scholarship as a memorial to her brother, who was killed in World War II. USAAF Staff Sergeant Morton Ogden Stafford Jr. (1919–1943) was an aerial gunner killed in action when his aircraft was shot down in Romania. Helen Stafford's ashes were scattered in the Reed College Canyon, a 28-acre (11.3-hectare) watershed spanned by two pedestrian bridges and a land bridge.

Books

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