Barbara Hyde Bowman (August 5, 1930 – May 15, 1996) was an American biologist, geneticist, and educator who was known for her research in human blood proteins.
Her work characterized variants of globins, the family of proteins responsible for transporting blood in oxygen, and in 1984, Oliver Smithies and she showed that variations in haptoglobins were due to polymorphisms in the HP gene.
At an early age, her parents gave her a chemistry set, which along with encouragement from her teachers and librarian, fostered her interest in science.
[1][4] Bowman became a professor and chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1967, where she began studying cystic fibrosis (CF).
A few years later, Oliver Smithies and she followed up on her earlier research on globins, and they discovered the different alleles of the HP gene that change how haptoglobins bind to free hemoglobin[1][6] She received the Distinguished Texas Geneticist Award in 1990, and after her death, it was renamed in her honor.