Francis Whittier Pennell (4 August 1886 – 3 February 1952) was an American botanist best known for his studies of the Scrophulariaceae.
Considered delicate by his family, he was excused from farm chores, which engendered in him a lifelong fear of water and incapacity with mechanical devices.
Encouraged by John M. Macfarlane, the head of the botany department, Pennell wrote his doctoral thesis on the Scrophulariaceae (as then circumscribed), a group on which he was to become a world authority.
[1] Pennell died of a heart attack while attending Quaker Meeting in Media, Pennsylvania in 1952.
published Pennellianthus, a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Russia and Japan, belonging to the family Plantaginaceae and also named in honour of Pennell.