Janaki Ammal Edvaleth Kakkat A Woman of Many Firsts Janaki Ammal led a remarkable life. Her persistence and dedication to research changed her country’s food supply and its economy; her status as an unmarried woman of lower caste did not deter her from becoming India’s first woman botanist. As the first woman from India to earn a Ph.D.—and the first woman in America to earn a Ph.D. in botany, at a time when only 1% of women in India were literate—her story embodies the success of the Barbour Scholars program. Ammal’s graduate education at Michigan fueled a career dedicated to increasing knowledge of the plant world, and she contributed years of work to help us understand the cytology of plants, the diversity and characteristics of native species in India, and the importance of preserving natural areas. Early Life and Education The tenth of 19 children, Ammal was born in Tellicherry (now Thalassery) in the state of Kerala, into a family that encouraged study. Ammal’s interest in the natural world began in childhood; her father wrote books about birds and kept a home garden. As her sisters followed the expected path into arranged marriages, she instead chose to pursue a bachelor’s degree at Queen Mary’s College, Madras, and an honor’s degree in botany from Presidency College. She taught for three years at the Women’s Christian College in Madras before the opportunity of a lifetime presented itself: she was offered the Barbour Scholarship at the University of Michigan. Barbour’s niece, Geeta Doctor, wrote that Ammal was detained at Ellis Island, despite being awarded a prestigious scholarship. Her release reportedly came when she was mistaken for an Indian princess, attired in traditional silks with long flowing hair—she told her niece, “I did not deny it.” She joined U-M’s Department of Botany in 1924, earning her M.S. and then Ph.D. in 1931. Ammal’s research in plant cytology focused on the hybridization of plants, producing interspecific and intergeneric hybrids. Career and Contributions After completing her studies at Michigan, Ammal’s career had three distinct phases. First, she was employed by the Imperial Sugar Cane Institute where she studied the cytology of sugarcane plants in order to develop a sweeter hybrid that would allow India to reduce its import of the product from Indonesia. Her work was critical to India’s effort to grow more food and increase its agricultural independence. In 1940, she was invited to Norwich, England to work at the John Innes Institute alongside geneticist Cyril Dean Darlington. Within five years they completed the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which remains a key text to botanists today. When the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisely offered her a position as a cytologist, she became its first salaried woman staff member. Return to India and Impact In 1951, Prime Minister Nehru requested her return to India. Ammal was appointed as government supervisor of the Botanical Survey of India, established in 1890 by Kew Gardens to collect and survey India’s flora.Ammal’s work served to record indigenous knowledge of plants and of their role in tribal culture. Her research on the hybridization of plants to India’s tropical climate sped the country’s recovery from a decade of brutal famines, including the Bengal famine in 1943 that killed close to 3 million. Conservation Efforts and Legacy Ultimately, she became alarmed by the level deforestation that the agricultural push to grow more food had produced, and in her later years worked to catalogue India’s plants that she feared would be lost forever. 25 million acres of land had been reclaimed by the government for food cultivation. Ammal used her status as a leading scientist to defend an important region of rain forests in her home state of Kerala. The Save Silent Valley campaign eventually caused the government to abandon its plan to flood the ancient forest for a hydroelectric project. In 1984, nine months after Ammal’s death, it was dedicated as a national park, preserving one of the last undisturbed tracts of the South Western Ghats mountain rain forests. A Lasting Inspiration Janaki Ammal’s accomplishments would be extraordinary in any time, but her role in the history of science and her country is even more amazing considering the limits on women, and women of lower caste, in her lifetime. She was described as a staunch Gandhian Buddhist, observing vows of chastity and austerity.Her niece quotes her as saying, “My work is what will survive.” In the forests of Kerala, in the rose and magnolia species named in her honor, and in the path she created as a Barbour Scholar, her inspiration lives, too.
Tsui-fung Wong Tsui-fung Wong (1924) served as Dean of Women and Professor of Sociology at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. At the end of WWII, she traveled to England and Scotland, as a guest of the British Aid to China Fund, in order to study rehabilitation programs and child welfare work. After returning to Lingnan University, Tsui-fung managed an increasing enrollment of students with very limited resources as the result of war and inflation. In addition to her university work, Tsui-fung organized a Child Welfare Leadership Training program, with assistance from the United Service to China, Inc.
Maria Lanzar Maria Lanzar (1923) was the first Barbour Scholar to earn a doctoral degree, along with Yi-fang Wu, in 1928. Mariagraduated with a doctorate in Political Science in 1928. As the first Barbour Scholar from Manila, Lanzar studied the methods by which American sovereignty was exercised in the Philippines. For her dissertation, The Anti-Imperialist League, Maria obtained material from libraries in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, and also from personal files of American politicians and statesmen who had taken part in legislation regarding the Philippines. After receiving her Ph.D. she returned to Manila as a member of the faculty in political science and also served for several years as Dean of Women. Maria served as an active member of the Philippine Association of University Women and the Philippine Academy of Social Sciences.
Yi-fang Wu Yi-fang Wu (1922) became the first Barbour Scholar (along with Maria Lanzar) to earn a doctoral degree in 1928. Dr. Wu, born on January 26, 1893 in Hupei, China, as a child underwent the tortures of foot binding. Realizing that she could not pursue her dream of being a modern woman on four-inch feet, she imposed on herself ten or fifteen years later the painful processes of unbinding and somewhat lengthening her deformed feet. She graduated in 1919 as a member of the first class of Ginling Women’s College in Nanking, China. That year, she began teaching and, in 1922, became head of the English Department at the Government Higher Normal School for Women in Peking. At this time, Mary Wooley, President of Mount Holyoke College, was touring China and was very impressed by Wu’s work. President Wooley, upon her return to the United States, recommended Wu for a Barbour Scholarship. Wu earned her master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1924 and her doctoral degree in 1928. In 1928, she returned to China as a newly minted Ph.D. in Biology to assume the presidency of her undergraduate alma mater, Ginling Women’s College, becoming the first native Chinese woman to lead the school. The most fascinating part of Ginling College’s history, and the reason why today it is a household name in China, is because of the heroism of its faculty and staff during the Rape of Nanking, when the campus served as a refuge for hundreds of women fleeing the Japanese. During her twenty-three-year presidency, Dr. Wu led the college in peacetime as well as through the chaos of the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil Wars. Dr. Wu had a long and distinguished career in which she served on many religious, educational, and government councils in pre-Communist China and as a Chinese delegate to many international meetings including the National Congress of Women in Chicago and the founding conference for the United Nations in San Francisco. In April 1979, Dr. Wu traveled to Ann Arbor to receive the University of Michigan Alumnae Athena Award “in recognition of her professional distinction and dedication to the cause of education and the rights of women during turbulent times for her country.” Dr. Wu accepted this honor, “not just to me personally, but to my motherland, especially Chinese women.”
Kameyo Sadakata Kameyo Sadakata (1914), the first Barbour Scholar, arrived at the University of Michigan from Japan in 1914, three years before Barbour officially endowed the program in 1917. Kameyo’s English was very limited and she did not have the academic preparation to enter the university. She lived with the Barbours, who taught her American customs and arranged for private tutors to prepare her for university-level work. Kameyo matriculated for pre-medical courses in September, 1915, and entered the medical school three years later. She earned her M.D. degree in 1924 and worked at the University Hospital for an additional year, doing specialized work in pediatrics. In 1926, Kameyo took a position on the staff of St. Luke’s International Hospital, Tokyo, one of the foremost medical centers in Asia. She became an internationally recognized authority in her field. In 1932, Kameyo returned to the University of Michigan to conduct research for one year as a Barbour Fellow.
Tong-Soon Kwak It would hardly be a stretch to say organ music runs in Tong-Soon Kwak’s blood. The daughter of Sang-Soo Kwak, a famed conductor, organist, and music professor in South Korea, Kwak first studied the instrument that would come to dominate her artistic and professional life under his tutelage at Yonsei University. Upon receiving a Fulbright Scholarship in 1973, Kwak brought her talents across the world to U-M, where she received her master of music degree in organ performance from the U-M School of Music, Theater, and Dance (SMTD). Her U-M journey had only just begun, however. In 1974, Kwak became a recipient of the Barbour Scholarship, granting her the full financial support she needed to begin her doctoral program at SMTD. One of the oldest and most prestigious awards granted by U-M, the Barbour Scholarship was established by Levi Lewis Barbour in 1917 and is awarded annually to women of the highest academic and professional caliber from Asia and the Middle-East. Kwak studied under Marilyn Mason, an SMTD professor and internationally renowned organist who holds the record for longest-serving U-M faculty member at 66 years. Her connection to Mason ran deeper, however—it was during these years that Kwak met and married, Sung-In Chang, who was a student of Mason’s husband, U-M Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Richard K. Brown. Mason herself played the organ at Kwak and Chang’s 1976 wedding. She received her doctor of musical arts in organ performance in 1981. After a few years in Toledo and Chicago, Kwak returned to South Korea with her husband and followed in her father’s footsteps, becoming a professor in the School of Music at Yonsei University. Her love of the organ permeated every aspect of her life, as she also served as president of the Korean Association of Organists, director of the Church Music Research Society of Korea, director of the Music Research Institute at Yonsei University, and as organist for Yonsei University’s Luce Chapel. While her career has taken her from one side of the world to the other—serving on the jury for many prestigious international organ competitions around the world and performing widely throughout South Korea and the United States, as well as across Europe and Asia—she has always found herself pulled back to Ann Arbor. In 1999, she was invited by SMTD to play at the annual Organ Conference at Hill Auditorium, and again in 2003 when she performed an organ recital on the Marilyn Mason Organ, built in honor of her mentor. Kwak retired from Yonsei University’s active faculty in 2013, but her zeal for music remains unabated. In 2017, her family donated an organ in the same style as U-M’s Marilyn Mason Organ to the Luce Chapel in memory of her father, and she runs a YouTube channel called Musician K, where she uploads concert footage from both her own and her father’s performances.
