Biography

American mycologist and phytopathologist. Kern specialised in Uredinales (rust fungi) and spent the best part of his career at Pennsylvania State University. Born in Reinbeck, Iowa, Kern took his bachelor's degree (1904) at the University of Iowa and his master's (1907) at Purdue. He gained his PhD at Columbia University (1911), publishing a thesis entitled "A biologic and taxonomic study of the genus Gymnosporangium" that appeared again in book form 62 years later.

Kern remained at Purdue University as an associate botanist in the Lafayette Agricultural Experiment Station (1905-1910) and as an instructor in cryptogamic botany (1910-1913) prior to beginning his tenure at Pennsylvania (then State College), where he remained until his retirement in 1950. It was in this role that he issued his first publications on plant diseases and embarked on what was to be his lifetime field of scholarship, the plant rusts. He had also been a research scholar at New York Botanic Garden before his election as professor of botany at Pennsylvania, and was an associate editor of the journal Mycologia from 1926-1932. Head of the botany department, Kern also became dean of the new Graduate School at Pennsylvania in 1922.

Among Kern's major works (he published more than 80 papers in all) were several works on the fungi and rusts to be found in Pennsylvania and in Latin American countries. He also published a textbook in 1948, The Essentials of Plant Biology. Moreover, it is worth noting that Kern's re-worked thesis, A revised taxonomic account of Gymnosporangium, is probably the only taxonomic treatment to have been revised and republished by the original author after more than six decades since its original publication.

Kern met botanist Carlos Chardon while the Puerto Rican was studying for his PhD at Cornell, and the pair travelled to Chardon's homeland in 1924 and made collections together. This association led to Kern's further involvement in Latin American mycology and together with H.H. Whetzel and H.W. Thurston he published several works dealing with the rusts and smuts of Puerto Rico, Columbia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. He was particularly involved with the University of Puerto Rico, serving as an acting dean of its colleges of agriculture and engineering in 1925-1926 and in 1933-1934. The university honoured him with a DSc degree in 1926. After 37 years of service at Pennsylvania University, meanwhile, he was named professor emeritus and dean emeritus of the university's Graduate School. A number of fungi taxa are named after him including Kernella Thirum. and Kerniomyces Toro, as was Pennsylvania University's Kern Graduate Building.

Sources:
C.L. Fergus, R.D. Schein and J.S. Boyle, 1974, "Frank Dunn Kern (1883-1973)", Mycologia, 66(5): 739-742.