Charles Russell Burnham (1904–1995) was an American plant geneticist who studied maize cytology and genetics.
[1] After his retirement he played a critical role in developing a blight resistant strain of the American chestnut.
At this point, he received a National Research Fellowship to travel to Cornell University where he studied under Rollins A. Emerson and alongside Marcus Rhoades and future Nobel Prize winners Barbara McClintock and George Beadle.
After Cornell, Burnham went on to work at Harvard with Edward Murray East and then to the California Institute of Technology.
[3] Burnham's research at the University of Minnesota touched on a number of species including maize, barley and flax.