Jadwiga Siemińska-Słupska – the personification of Polish phycology (1922–2018)

Abstract

Professor Jadwiga Siemińska devoted her working life to biology, hydrobiology and phycology, and in particular the classification and taxonomy of algae, especially diatoms. She gained her academic education alongside the likes of university professors Karol Starmach, Bogumił Pawłowski, Franciszek Górski and Jadwiga Wołoszyńska – world-renowned algae researchers (Siemińska-Słupska 1976; Wołowski 1997). An excellent knowledge of foreign languages (English, Latin, German, Russian, French) allowed her to form extensive contacts and to lead international research projects. She set very high expectations for herself and her students. Her talents, character, organizational skills and sense of responsibility enabled her to play an important role in the reconstruction and development of Polish phycology after World War II. Thanks to her foundational work done in cooperation with Professor Starmach, Polish phycologists are full partners in worldwide phycological research today. She described numerous new species over a wide range of algal groups, writing important monographs on the identification of freshwater diatoms, researching the algal communities of rivers and waterbodies in Central Europe, identifying species of snow algae, advancing research on fossil diatoms, establishing Europe’s second collection of images of algae from world publications (the Iconotheca of Algae, inspired by the British Fritsch Collection), establishing a phycological information centre which houses the Card Index of Polish Algae Sites, and authoring three volumes of Polish Phycological Bibliog­ raphy through the year 2000. Jadwiga Siemińska was passionate about mountain hiking. On one of those trips she met her husband, Jan Słupski. She married him in 1963 but in her scientific works she usually kept the maiden name. She began climbing in 1949 in the Tatras; later her expeditions expanded to the Austrian, French, Swiss and Italian Alps, as well as the mountains of Sweden, Norway, Greece and Spain. She was a member of the Polish Association of Mountaineering (Morawska 2018). During those hikes she also collected samples for observation. The following is a short overview of Sieminska’s contributions to Polish and world phycology in a career spanning more than half a century.