João Murça Pires (1917-1994) was a Brazilian botanist, who worked principally at the Instituto Agronômico do Norte.
He received both his undergraduate (1942) and doctoral (1983) degrees from the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, University of São Paulo.
[2] He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 in the field of plant sciences.
[3] He initiated the herbarium and botanical section at the Instituto Agronômico do Norte and founded the Department of Botany and the herbaria at the Universidade de Brasília.
He also helped restructure the Department of Botany at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, and the herbaria there is named after him.