American botanist. Rollins was director of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University from 1948 to 1978, where he served as a professor for most of his career. Reed Clark Rollins was born in Lyman, Wyoming and graduated from the University of Wyoming. He took his master's degree at Washington State University and gained his PhD in 1941 from Harvard. He joined the faculty at Harvard in 1948, after serving as associate professor of biology at Stanford University and as a geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During the Second World War he worked on the government’s Emergency Guayule Rubber Research Project. Rollins had broad interests in taxonomy and genetics, but his specialisation was in the mustard family, Brassicaceae, beginning with studies of Arabis as a graduate student. With his wife, Kathryn Rollins, he had a son and a daughter. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and many professional societies. After his retirement he was appointed the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany Emeritus at Harvard, where the Reed C. Rollins Fund for Botanical Field Work was established in his honour. On his receiving the 1987 Asa Gray Award, a tribute described Rollins as a 'soft-spoken, cordial mentor' and inspirational teacher.

Sources:
I.A. Al-Shehbaz, 1999, Taxon, 48(2): 225-256
Christopher S. Campbell and Craig W. Greene, 1988, "A Tribute to Reed Clark Rollins Recipient of the 1987 Asa Gray Award", Systematic Botany, 13(1): 170-171.

Sources:
I.A. Al-Shehbaz, 1998, "Reed Clark Rollins (7 December 1911 - 28 April 1998)", Taxon, 48(2): 225-256.