Wanda K. Farr (January 9, 1895 – April 16, 1983) was an American botanist known for her discovery of the mechanism by which cellulose is formed in the walls of plant cells. Early life Wanda Farr (née Kirkbride) was born near New Matamoras, Ohio on January 9, 1895, to parents Frederick Alonzo Kirkbride and Clara M Nikolaus. When she was four years old, her father died and she and her mother went to live with Wanda's grandparents in New Matamoras. Her great grandfather, Dr. Samuel Richardson, was a physician who lived in the same town. He helped cultivate her interest in science, in particular in plants and growing things. Education and research Wanda K. Farr received a bachelor's degree in biology from Ohio University at Athens in 1915 and a master's degree studying Botany at Columbia University in 1918. After graduating from Columbia, she taught at Kansas State University and Texas A&M University. Around 1928, after marrying botanist Clifford Farr, Wanda Farr postponed enrolling in a Ph.D. program in order to move with her husband to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. There, she began working as a researcher under Dr. Montrose Burrows at the Barnard Skin and Cancer Clinic, and her husband began working as an assistant professor in botany at the same university. Farr performed microscopy on live animal and plant cell cultures. In February 1928, Clifford Farr died and the University asked Farr to teach his classes. She began research related to her late husband's work studying the growth of root hairs in plants. Within a few years, Wanda Farr was hired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a cotton technologist on the strength of her previous root hair research. She moved to the Boyce Thompson Institute laboratory in Yonkers, New York. After approximately ten years of research, she was appointed as Director of the Cellulose Laboratory of the Chemical Foundation at the same institute, until she was called to the laboratories of the American Cyanimide Company to do World War II war-related research. She was elected in 1930 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1956, she started her own research firm, Farr Cyochemical Laboratories. The Royal Microscopical Society elected her a fellow. She was also a member of the Botanical Society of America and the Torrey Botanical Club. Notable scientific discovery Farr answered a question that had puzzled