Maria Vorontsova (botanist)
Maria Sergeevna Vorontsova is a Russian-born botanist, specializing in the taxonomy of Poaceae. She was responsible for authoring the taxon for Solanum agnewiorum and Solanum umtuma. She is a member of the Accelerated Taxonomy department at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She is one of the co-authors and maintainers of GrassBase, and is an editor of the journal, Phytotaxa.
In 2010, she identified a new species of Africa spiny aubergine, Solanum ruvu, which had been collected only once in the wild ten years earlier. A subsequent expedition failed to locate it, and it is now believed to be extinct due to deforestation.