Lowell Fitz Randolph (7 October 1894 – 28 May 1980) was an American scientist, in the field of genetics, botany and horticulture.

He was a Cornell College graduate who became Professor of Botany and was also employed as an associate cytologist for the United States Department of Agriculture.

Lowell's family had over 200 years of history of being deeply involved in the Seventh Day Baptist Church community, and that Lowell and his sister Vida were the first to break with that community and strong tradition and follow independent, secular paths pursuing their passion for science.

[1][2][failed verification] In 1918, he then went to Cornell College to complete his Ph.D. and work as an assistant in botany under Rollins A. Emerson and Lester W.

[7]: 99 [8] They then started to apply the smear technique to pollen cells of corn and hypothesized the origin of polyploidy in Maize.

[7]: 99 [failed verification] He and his students at Cornell started following up on the work on chromosome studies of garden irises by Marc Simonet at the Genetic Institute at Versailles, France in 1930s.

In a complaint letter to Marcus Morton Rhoades (Editor of Genetics journal) in 1942, he criticised Barbara McClintock's editing the work of a pupil of Randolph's.

[9] After World War II, he began to study corn seed that had been exposed to atomic radiation at Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific Ocean.

[1] He also collected with Efraim Ildefonso Hernández-Xolocotzi Guzman (1913–1991) in Mexico for the Natural History Museum and Grey Herbarium.

[19] In 1954, he went to Europe and the Middle East on an iris hunting field trip, which included Switzerland, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Germany, Austria, Cypress, Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt.

[20] He then spent six months in 1957–58 at Aligarh Muslim University in India with a Fulbright Award,[1] as a consultant on embryo culture.

[26][27] Randolph and his wife, kept an extensive collection of iris in his garden at their home in Ithaca, which attracted many visitors.

[28] After nearly 40 years at Cornell, he retired in 1961, but started working part-time during the winters, at the Fairchild Tropical Garden,[13][29] in Miami, Florida as a research collaborator.

[1] In 1966, Iris nelsonii was first published and described by Randolph in 'Baileya' (a Quarterly Journal of Horticultural Taxonomy of Ithaca, NY) 14: 150 in 1966.

Plaisted published 'Negative evidence of introgression affecting the stability of Louisiana Iris species' Cornell Univ Ag.

He was award many honours including; He married a fellow Cornell graduate student in botany, Fannie C. Rane in 1922.