John Thomas Curtis (September 20, 1913 – June 7, 1961) was an American botanist and plant ecologist.
He remained affiliated with that university for the remainder of his career, except through 1942–1945, when he served as research director of the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole.
In 1951 he was made full professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin.
The collective efforts of Curtis and the thirty-nine Ph.D. students that he managed to supervise during his relatively short career, resulted in the work The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities, published 1959.
[full citation needed] This book remains one of the important contributions to the field of plant ecology during the twentieth century, and spawned the Wisconsin School of North American plant ecology.