Konstantin Gedroits

Konstantin Kaetanovich Gedroits was a Russian soil scientist of Lithuanian noble descent, born 25 March 1872 in Bender, Moldova, and died 5 October 1932 in Moscow. He graduated from the Saint Petersburg Forest Institute in 1897 and from Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1903, later leading the chemistry laboratory of the Dokuchaev Soil Institute in Moscow from 1915 to 1917 and the Department of Soil Science at the Forest Institute in Saint Petersburg from 1917 to 1930. His research centered on soil chemical analysis and the soil's capacity to hold and exchange nutrients; in 1922 he introduced the concept of the soil absorption complex, describing how cations exchange between the soil solution and the soil's own absorbing particles, work the American pedologist Charles Kellogg later judged superior to comparable soil chemistry research done anywhere else. He was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, received the Lenin Prize in 1927, and served as president of the International Union of Soil Sciences (then the International Society of Soil Science) from 1927 to 1930.