American botanist. Born in Boston, Bernice Schubert was educated at the University of Massachussets at Amherst (BSc 1935) and Radcliffe College (AM 1937, PhD 1941). Both of her graduate degrees were earned under the guidance of Merritt Lyndon Fernald, director of the Gray Herbarium, who suggested Desmodium for her thesis topic, one of the remaining problematic genera in his work for the eighth edition of Gray's Manual. He also assigned her the task of identifying a Mexican collection by G.B. Hinton. In 1939, "Plantae Mexicanae 1", containing descriptions of new species of Cassia and Begonia, was published in The Contributions of the Gray Herbarium, with Schubert and Lyman B. Smith as co-authors. Although there were no further papers in this proposed series, it was the beginning of their collaborative work on the genus Begonia, which continued until 1985.

Throughout her studies, Schubert was a part-time research assistant at the Gray Herbarium, and after completing the degree programme, she worked full time at the herbarium until 1949. In addition to her herbarium assignments, she collaborated with Prof. Fernald on ten papers, and provided major assistance on his definitive publications, Gray's Manual (1949) and Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (1943). At the end of 1946 she travelled to Europe to photograph the type specimens of North American plants kept at the British Museum, Kew, the Linnaean Society, Cambridge, Paris, and Geneva, the result of which was approximately 800 images, reproduced in Rhodora in 1947 and 1948. Schubert returned to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 to pursue research on Desmodium at herbaria in England, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. After her research trip she was commissioned by the Jardin Botanique de l'Etat in Brussels to identify collections submitted by ecologists in the Belgian Congo and to produce taxonomic studies of the genera of the Leguminosae for the Flore du Congo Belge et du Ruanda Urundi. On her return to the United States in 1952, she was hired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for two projects in its Plant Introduction Section: the taxonomy of North and Central American species of Dioscorea and a cooperative study, with the National Heart Institute, to identify alkaloid-bearing plants potentially useful in treating high blood pressure. Schubert made a series of extensive field trips to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and Mexico, with shorter visits to Panama and Brazil, to collect material for both projects and co-authored 12 papers, including the summary publication, "Alkaloid-bearing plants and their contained alkaloids" (1961).

From 1962 until the last years of her life, she was associated with the Arnold Arboretum. Promoted to curator in 1969, she also served as editor of the arboretum's journal (1962-1974), chair of the joint Arnold Arboretum-Gray Herbarium publication committee (1975-1979), and supervisor of the Harvard University Herbaria building (1969-1975). Volume 65 (3) of the Journal of the Arnold Arboretum is dedicated to her life and career. She published a total of 95 papers, the last in 1994, including 29 on Begonia, 19 on Desmodium, and 11 on Dioscorea. She was Honorary Member of the Sociedad Botánica de Mexico and Honorary Vice President of the III Congreso Latinoamericano de Botánica and II Congreso Nacional de Botánica (Peruana) at Lima, Peru. She was also a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Council Member of the Society of Economic Botany, and a member of the Société Royale de Botanique de Belgique; AETFAT, the New England Botanical Club; the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the International Association of Plant Taxonomy, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Botanical Society of America, and the Association of Tropical Biologists.

Sources:
R.A. Howard, 2000, "Bernice Giduz Schubert (1913-2000)", Taxon, 49(4): 821-827.