Raffaele Ciferri

Raffaele Ciferri, born May 30, 1897, in Fermo, Italy, and died February 12, 1964, in Pavia, was an Italian botanist, agriculturalist and mycologist who studied agricultural sciences at the University of Bologna. From 1925 to 1932 he lived in the Dominican Republic, where he established an experimental agricultural station in Santiago de los Caballeros focused on cassava research, and during this period he also investigated cacao diseases in Ecuador. In 1936 he became a botany professor at the agricultural faculty in Florence, and from 1942 he held a botany professorship at the University of Pavia, authoring more than a thousand publications spanning mycology, plant pathology, microbiology, virology and agronomy; the ambrosia fungus genus Raffaelea is named in his honor.