Wanda Zabłocka

Wanda Zabłocka (1900 to 1978) was a Polish botanist, phytopathologist and mycologist, born in Tarnów. She began doctoral studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków while teaching at a state gymnasium for girls, was awarded her doctorate in 1925 and worked as a senior assistant in the Department of Botany of the Faculty of Agriculture. She visited the Institute of Botany and the Natural History Museum in Vienna and the Natural History Museum in Paris, and in the mid-1930s published on the mycorrhizal fungi that form symbiotic relationships with the plant genus Viola. After defending her habilitation thesis in 1945 she moved in 1946 to Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, where she helped establish the Departments of General Botany and Microbiology, headed the Department of Mycology and was a professor from 1954 to 1970. She also wrote several books about fungi for the general public.