American botanist and geologist. The son of Czech political refugees, Bohumil Shimek was born in 1861 on a farm in Iowa and became an orphan when both parents died while he was still a boy. Left to fend for himself, he worked his way through high school and college and by 1883 he had graduated from the University of Iowa as a civil engineer. However, a love of nature and of collecting plants and rocks convinced him to change the course of his studies and career, and in 1888 he became an instructor in zoology in the University of Nebraska. Two years later, he returned to his alma mater, joining the faculty of the Department of Botany where he continued to teach and serve for 50 years, becoming head of the department, director of the Lakeside Laboratory at Lake Okoboji, Iowa, and curator of the herbarium. His scientific interests, however, were not limited to botany. Shimek did important work in both geology and paleobotany, undertaking research into the interpretation of loess deposits and their fossils, gathering, in doing so, an immense collection of loess fossils. He was also interested in glacial drifts and in the faunas of interglacial deposits of Iowa and surrounding states, and is the author of the term Nebraskan, applied to the till sheet underlying the Aftonian interglacial deposits. A member of many scientific organizations, American and foreign, he was particularly proud of the Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded him by Charles University, Prague, for his contributions to science. He died in 1937, aged 75.

Sources:
Anon, 1937, "Memorial of Dr. Shimek (1861-1937)", Journal of the Iowa Academy of Sciences, 44: 31-33
G.W. Martin, 1937, "Bohumil Shimek, 1861-1937", Mycologia, 29(3): 364-365.