Franklin David Keim

Franklin David Keim was an American agronomist, born 10 September 1886 in Hardy, Nebraska, and died 7 March 1956 in Washington, D.C., who chaired the Department of Agronomy at the University of Nebraska for twenty-two years, from 1930 to 1952, a period in which the department doubled in size and strengthened its ties to the United States Department of Agriculture. He attended Bethany College in Kansas, earned a teaching certificate from Peru State College, took a bachelor's degree in 1914 and a master's degree in 1918 from the University of Nebraska, and completed a doctorate at Cornell University in 1927 under the plant geneticist Rollins A. Emerson, focusing his research on plant genetics, grasses and grazing. He was elected a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy in 1937 and served as its president in 1943, and among the scientists he mentored at Nebraska was the future Nobel Prize-winning geneticist George Beadle; the University of Nebraska's Keim Hall is named in his honor.