Howard C. Whisler

Howard C. Whisler (1931–2007) was an American mycologist. Born in Oakland, California, he attended Berkeley schools and then Palo Alto High School. Howard worked on his undergraduate degree at Oregon State College for two years and then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a Bachelor of Science degree in plant pathology in 1954. He joined the United States Air Force from 1954 to 1956 stationed in Italy. He returned to University of California, Berkeley after his military life and had finished his doctoral degree with Ralph Emerson in 1960. From 1960 to 1961 he held a post doctoral NATO-NSF Fellowship in France, at the Université de Montpellier. Howard was appointed assistant professor of Botany at McGill University in 1961. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of Washington on March 15, 1963 and worked until he died on September 16, 2007, at the age of 76.

Whisler had great admiration for Roland Thaxter and Cap Weston. When Whisler was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, he was introduced to the study of zoosporic fungi. During his graduate work at University of California, Berkeley he focused on fungi associated with invertebrates, receiving his doctorate in 1960 for a study of the entomogenous fungus Amoebidium parasiticum (Protozoan). He published his first paper on Amoebidium parasiticum (Protozoan) on Daphnia in the journal Nature in 1960. After that, he published a number of articles on zoosporic fungi. Additional publications included those on the Trichomycetes, Entomophthorales, Rubetella inopinata and Carouxella scalaris, with J. F. Manier and L. Rioux. He published many articles on the biology of Coelomomyces.[ From 1970, he did some research on members of the Oomycota, insect parasites in the Zygomycota and Ascomycota, and even delved for a bit into the Basidiomycota with G. A. Escobar, D. E. McCabe and C. W. Harpel. In the 1990s, Whisler carried out research on Saprolegnia parasitica, an oomycete parasite of Chinook salmon, as well as Woronia polycystis, a hyperparasitic organism that attacks ‘’Saprolegnia’’.