Lewis John Stadler was born in
St. Louis, Missouri, in 1896 to Henry Louis and Josephine Ehrman Stadler. Stadler's early education efforts were unremarkable, but two summers worked on Midwestern farms sparked an interest in agriculture. He began his undergraduate work at the
University of Missouri and completed a B.S. in agriculture at the
University of Florida (1917). Afterwards, he returned to the University of Missouri and earned the A.M. (1918). Post-A.M., he enrolled in the Field Artillery of the
United States Army, although his commission as Second Lieutenant was not used in overseas duty due to the end of
World War I. Stadler spent 1919 in graduate studies at
Cornell University under Harry Houser Love and
Rollins A. Emerson. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1941 and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. Stadler completed presidential terms for several academic organizations, including
Genetics Society of America,
American Society of Naturalists, and
Sigma Xi. While Stadler spent almost his entire academic life at the
University of Missouri he was also involved in external activities. During the 1930s Stadler participated in efforts to bring European scientists to the U.S. to escape Nazism. In 1948 Stadler was appointed a delegate to the Eighth International Congress of Genetics, which met in Stockholm. However, the
U.S. Department of Agriculture rejected his passport application and conducted a loyalty investigation; Stadler initially thought it was a State Department action. Stadler married Cornelia Field Tuckerman in 1919. They had six children: Maury, Henry, David, John, Eliot, and Joan. Although Stadler's initial research was on field plot technique and
agronomy, His work earned him an international reputation. He died of
leukemia in 1954. In his honor, the
University of Missouri holds the Stadler Genetics Symposium every two years. ==References==