U.S. botanist specialising in wood and orchid anatomy. Bill Stern (as he was known) was born and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, where he concentrated on agricultural subjects in his later years at school. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1944 and served in Guam until 1946. Returning to the U.S., Stern attended the National Farm School (Delaware Valley College) before studying botany at Rutgers University. After graduating in 1950, he continued his studies in the subject at the University of Illinois, where he earned his master's degree (1951) and PhD (1953).
Stern went on to join the School of Forestry at Yale University as an instructor and continued his research into wood anatomy and angiosperm phylogeny while curating Yale's large collection of woods. He moved to the Smithsonian Institution in 1960 as curator of the Division of Wood Anatomy, where he remained until 1967 apart from a year working in the Philippines. This was spent at the Forest Products Research Institute near Los Baños, under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Stern then joined the University of Maryland as a professor and in 1978-1979 was based in Washington at the National Science Foundation. Another move ensued as he accepted the position of professor and chairman of the Botany Department at the University of Florida, where he remained in the chair until 1985 and thereafter continued his teaching and research. In Florida, however, Stern's focus changed somewhat as he initiated a series of studies on orchids, looking at their vegetative anatomy and relationships between them.
Over the course of his career, Stern has made collections, especially of wood specimens and orchids, in many different countries. He has edited the journals Tropical Wood, Plant Science Bulletin, Biotropica and the monograph series of the Torrey Botanical Club. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the Washington Biologists' Field Club and numerous other organisations. He was married to Flory Stern (d. 1999), with whom he had two children.
