Edward Tuckerman (December 7, 1817, in Boston, Massachusetts – March 15, 1886) was an American botanist and professor who made significant contributions to the study of lichens and other alpine plants.

He studied at Boston Latin School and then at his father's urging at Union College in Schenectady, which he entered as a sophomore and where he completed a BA in 1837 and to which he returned for his MA after taking a law degree at Harvard in 1839, traveling in Germany and Scandinavia, and making the first of his botanical studies in the White Mountains.

[1] In 1846, he returned to Harvard as a senior (telling the President he intended to correct his father's error in breaking the family tradition), completed a second BA in 1847, then two or three years later entered the Divinity School and graduated from there in 1852.

[3] When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark went on their 1804-1806 expedition across the western United States, they collected many plant, seed, and flower species that had never been seen before.

He published a number of important studies in the field, drawing on both his own collecting and specimens sent to him from elsewhere, in particular by Charles Wright from Cuba.

[12] Tuckerman did not accept that lichens are a combination of fungi and algae, a theory advanced late in his life.

[13] He was honoured in the naming of several plant taxa including; Tuckermania Klotzsch, 1841 (family Ericaceae) now a synonym of Corema.

[20] Tuckerman was married to Sarah, daughter of Thomas Parkman Cushing, who was his father's business partner.