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Anna Weber-van Bosse (1852-1942), Phycologist
A young woman from a distinguished Amsterdam family who would rather rummage in ditches collecting algae than do anything else. Widowed at the age of twenty-six, she enrolled at the University of Amsterdam as an auditor. She became “drunk with joy” attending botany lectures by the famous botanist Hugo de Vries, and went on to develop into a world-renowned expert on algae.

Together with her husband, the zoologist Max Weber, she spent a year travelling through the Dutch East Indies aboard Hr.Ms. Siboga, a naval steamship converted into a floating laboratory. During the expedition she became the first woman in the world to be responsible for botanical-oceanographic research. She demonstrated that algae are essential for the survival of coral reefs. Her major contributions to marine science earned her an honorary doctorate in 1910, making her the first woman in the Netherlands to receive this distinction.