Maria Kuhnert-Brandstätter

Maria Kuhnert-Brandstätter (23 December 1919 – 20 April 2011), was an Austrian pharmacist trained in pharmacognosy and known for her research on thermomicroscopy, and her microchemical investigations of natural and synthetic drug substances.

[2] In 1945, she was appointed head of the Institute of Pharmacognosy at the University of Innsbruck, where she worked for over half a century.

Her initial interest was identifying medicinal substances using the Koflers newly invented heating microscope.

She expanded the microscope's design very early, exploring its applications and devoting time to more complex scientific tasks such as analyzing mixtures of substance and the so-called polymorphism phenomena.

[2] The first of Kuhnert-Brandstätter's several hundred published papers appeared in 1941 and described the thermomicroscopical characterization of drug substances.