Kass, Lee B.

Kass taught full time at Elmira College (1982-2000), conducted research with students as an Adjunct Professor at the L.H. Bailey Hortorium (BH), (1990-2014) and Plant Breeding & Genetics Section, Cornell University (2014-Present). She established the Elmira College Herbarium (ECH, 1984), founded on the historical plant collections of T. F. Lucy. At BH she completed the first edition of Field Guide to the Common Plants of San Salvador Island (1991), subsequently revised & updated (2005, 2009, 2nd printing revised 2019). While a Fulbright Scholar & Visiting Professor at the College of the Bahamas (1996), she facilitated the establishment of the Bahamas National Herbarium (BNH), of which she is currently an associate staff member. She has been Visiting Professor at the herbaria of Michigan State University, Cornell University and West Virginia University (WVU).

She is Adjunct Professor, at Cornell University, and WVU-Morgantown, where she focuses her efforts on publishing scientific papers and recently completed a biography of Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock (Kass 2024). She is co-author of Cornell’s Plant Breeding and Genetics Centennial History (Murphy & Kass, 2007, 2011). She consults on and investigates the biodiversity & reproductive biology of Bahamian Plants (Kass et al. 2018), and is a resource person for investigators on the Bahama Flora and for historians working in the field of botany and genetics. She guided Elmira College Honors and Research students in updating names for the T. F. Lucy Herbarium collection, currently housed at BH (Graver et al. 2005) and has recently completed curating Lucy’s specimens for the Buffalo Museum of Science (Tilden et al. 2008, Kelloff & Kass 2018). At WVU, she has taught graduate and undergraduate classes and conducts research on the history of genetics and plant biology (Kass 2019, Kass et al. 2019, Dirig et al. 2021; Kass & Eshbaugh 2024).