Kono Yasui

Kono Yasui (1880-1971) was a Japanese botanist and the first Japanese woman to earn a doctorate in science, awarded by Tokyo Imperial University in 1927 for cytological research on the fern genus Osmunda and on the anatomy of fossilized coal forming plants. Her doctoral work on coal petrography, examining the plant material preserved in Japanese coal seams, contributed to understanding the botanical origins of coal deposits. She spent most of her career at Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, later Ochanomizu University, where she built one of Japan's earliest research programs in plant cytology and trained a generation of Japanese women scientists at a time when few academic research paths were open to them. She also carried out research on the chromosomes and reproductive biology of various algae species.