Daphne Gail Fautin
Daphne Gail Fautin was an American professor of invertebrate zoology at the University of Kansas, specializing in sea anemones and symbiosis. She is world-renowned for her extensive work studying and classifying sea anemones and related species.
Education
Fautin received her B.S. in biology in 1966 from Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin, and her Ph.D. in zoology in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. dissertation was "Natural History of the Sea Anemone Epiactis prolifera Verrill, 1869, with Special Reference to Its Reproductive Biology."Career
Fautin published numerous scientific articles and texts—including co-authoring Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on cnidarians—and her publications have been widely cited by other researchers in the field. From 1995 to 2014, Fautin served as the first faculty-curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.In her career, Fautin personally identified at least 19 new species. Fautin has been called "the world authority on anemones", by Prof. J. Frederick Grassle of Rutgers University, who led the international Census of Marine Life completed in 2010. As part of the Census, she co-created with her husband, Prof. R. W. Buddemeier of the Kansas Geological Survey, an extensive database of hexacorals and related species. This database was later absorbed into Ocean Biodiversity Information System and World Register of Marine Species. Fautin was a founding member of OBIS's first international committee. Furthermore, she served as the vice-chair of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility science committee.
Fautin served as vice president and commissioner of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, overseeing the naming of new species. She served as the editor of the scientific journal Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics.
Although she lived and worked in landlocked Lawrence, Kansas, she felt that working from dry land was not a serious impediment, stating that "you only need to be near an airport, not the ocean." She died on March 12, 2021.