Patricia Bergquist

Dame Professor Patricia Rose Bergquist, DBE, Fellow RSNZ (born 10 March 1933) is a widely-known expert on anatomy and taxonomy from New Zealand. She is Professor Emerita of Zoology and Honorary Professor of Anatomy at the University of Auckland.

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Following her doctorate she studied overseas, initially at Yale University where she broadened her systematic expertise. She began to realise that the state of taxonomic research in New Zealand was somewhat mediocre.

To rectify this Dr. Bergquist has been an innovative educator and researcher at the University of Auckland on matters related to anatomy, taxonomy and zoology. She has always been particularly interested in the marine sponge and anxious to cure the general lack of information on marine sponge. She felt a stable framework of higher level classification which would permit recognition of generic relationships and facilitate descriptions of new species was missing and has played an enormous role in helping this facilitation.

She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for her contributions to science, and is styled as Dame Professor Patricia Bergquist.

Writings

She co-authored (with Mary E. Sinclair) The Morphology and Behaviour of Larvae of Some Intertidal Sponges for the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, which was published on 20 October 1967.