Joan W. Nowicke

Joan W. Nowicke (born 1938) is an American botanist from St. Louis, Missouri. She worked 27 years for the Smithsonian Institution, between 1972 and 1999, in the Department of Botany, from the National Museum of Natural History. Nowicke is a global reference as a palynologist, mainly due to her specialization in pollen morphology and its relationship with systematics, in addition to her extensive work in the area of Caryophyllales palynotaxonomy.

In 1989 botanists J.Martínez & J.A.McDonald published Nowickea, a genus of flowering plants from Mexico, belonging to the family Phytolaccaceae and named in her honour.