Mycologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from 1910 to 1951. Elsie Wakefield was a specialist in Basidiomycetes and an international authority on Aphyllophorales. Born in Birmingham, Wakefield studied at Oxford and Munich before being recruited by Kew to work in the herbarium. She also spent six months in Barbados as a mycologist for the West Indies Imperial Department of Agriculture (1920-1921), taking the opportunity to study tropical fungi and diseases of tropical crops. She served in the position of deputy keeper during her last five years at Kew and was active in mycological nomenclatural issues. Wakefield was recognised for her dedication to the fungal collections at the Kew herbarium and their meticulous organisation, rather than published research, of which she produced relatively little. "A lifetime of care and maintenance and the solving of other people’s problems of identification sounds much less exciting and memorable than one of phylogenetic speculation and taxonomic innovation but it is of much more permanent value to science," as her one-time assistant, R.W.G. Dennis put it.

Sources:
A.A. Bullock, 1951, "Miss Elsie M. Wakefield, OBE, MA, FLS", Taxon, 1(7): 113-114
R.W.G. Dennis, 1972, "Miss E.M. Wakefield", Journal of the Kew Guild, 9(77): 163-164.