American agrostologist. Frank Gould was born in Mayville, North Dakota, but grew up mainly in DeKalb, Illinois, where his father was head of the geography department at Northern Illinois University. After completing his BA in DeKalb, he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and wrote his master's thesis on the prairie remnants of Dane County. In 1941 he earned his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley for a monograph of the liliaceous genus Camassia.

During his graduate assistant work with Dr G. Ledyard Stebbins, he became intrigued with the study of grasses, a field which later earned him worldwide recognition. He began his career as a biology teacher in Utah and California, but in 1944 was appointed curator of the herbarium at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In 1949 he moved to the S.M. Tracy Herbarium at Texas A. & M. University. He remained at the Tracy Herbarium for thirty years, retiring as distinguished professor emeritus in 1979, having built the herbarium into one of the most respected research facilities in the United States. During his tenure he also had teaching and research assignments in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, and England. He was the author of 80 definitive treatments on grasses, four grass manuals (Southwestern USA, Texas Coastal Bend, Texas, Baja California), and the well known textbook Grass Systematics. Gould made more than 30 trips to Mexico and collected in all states except Tabasco and Quintano Roo. Shortly before his retirement he started work on a manual of the grasses of Mexico. Much of the research and some of the manuscript were complete at the time of his death.

Sources:
L. Gould, 1981, "Frank Walton Gould", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 68(1): 4
S.L. Hatch, 1981, "Frank Walton Gould", Taxon, 30(3): 733.