Sparrow, F. K. (Frederick Kroeber), 1903-

Mycologist and botanist. Educated at Harvard (A.M. 1926; Ph.D. in Mycology, 1929). Professor of Botany at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1949-1973, and Director of Biological Station, 1969-1972. Specialized in freshwater and marine fungi, and aquatic botany.

Professor of Botany, the University of Michigan, 1936-1977.

Frederick K. Sparrow was born on May 11, 1903, in Washington, D.C., the only child of Minnie Tomlinson and Frederick Kroeber Sparrow. His interest in natural history began while he was a child. In 1925, he graduated with a B.S. degree from the University of Michigan. While at the University of Michigan, he also met Anna Gabler, who he married in 1925. Shortly thereafter, he began his graduate studies at Harvard University. He received his A.M. degree in 1926 and his Ph.D. in 1929. In 1929, he joined the faculty of Dartmouth College as an Instructor, later becoming an Assistant Professor in Biology. It was at this time that he published his first paper on chytridiaceous fungi, a group of organisms on which he would publish many papers.

Sparrow also had a great interest in aquatic fungi. He was able to conduct much research on this subject during his Research Fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution during the summers of 1934-1936. Further studies were undertaken in the summers of 1968 and 1972, when he worked at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories. He also studied marine fungi at the Botany School at Cambridge, England in 1956.

In 1936, Sparrow returned to the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor, becoming Professor of Botany in 1949. He also taught and conducted research at the University of Michigan Biological Station, where he was named Acting Director in 1967 and Director in 1968. He also held appointments as Visiting Professor to several institutions: at the University of Hawaii in 1963, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, and after his retirement in 1973, at the University of South Florida and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Sparrow received many awards and positions of honor. He was Secretary-Treasurer of the Mycological Society of America from 1945 to 1948, after which he was elected Vice-President of the Society, and President in 1949. He was elected President of the Michigan Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Letters in 1954, and selected to be the Seventh Annual Lecturer of the Mycological Society of America in 1958. In 1968, he received the Award of Merit from the Botanical Society of America. This was the same year that he was elected a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science.

In 1964, he was elected Honorary Vice President of the Tenth International Botanical Congress in Edinburgh and in 1977 he was President of the Second International Mycological Congress in Tampa, Florida. It was at this Congress, held in August of 1977 that he gave his address on Professor Anton de Bary. He died on October 2nd of the same year, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

References: "Frederick Kroeber Sparrow (1903-1977)" by Robert A. Paterson in Mycologia, 70(2), 1978, pp. 213-221.