Alice Maria Ottley (1882–1971) was a botanist, author, assistant professor and curator of the herbarium at Wellesley College.

[1] She collected and studied American flora, particularly species of Lotus, and publishing books and articles on botany.

Over the years, the two had worked together on research between expeditions to South Africa and Mozambique and her time at Wellesley.

[8] In 1939, she resigned from the faculty to travel and work with her aunt, the botanist Margaret Clay Ferguson.

[5] In 1999 the plant genus Ottleya was named in her honour as a result of her being the first to describe the group, undertaking an important revision of its species and drew the attention to the flower symmetry as a taxonomic character in Papilionaceae-Loteae.