Ernest W. Lindstrom

Ernest Walter Lindstrom (1891 to 1948) was an American geneticist and professor at Iowa State College who worked on the genetics and breeding of maize. Born in Chicago to Swedish immigrants, he studied biology at Colorado College and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914, then worked with R. A. Emerson at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University, where his PhD thesis of 1917 dealt with chlorophyll inheritance in maize. After serving as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Service in the First World War and teaching genetics at Wisconsin, he joined Iowa State College in 1922 to establish a department of genetics, working there for 25 years and serving as vice dean from 1936 to 1948. He worked on mapping the chromosomes of maize and on quantitative inheritance and polyploidy in tomato, and in 1944 and 1945 he helped the Colombian government set up a genetics department at the National University of Medellín.