Dame Patricia Rose Bergquist DBE (née Smyth, 10 March 1933 – 9 September 2009) was a New Zealand zoologist who specialised in anatomy and taxonomy.
[1][3] After completing a second MSc equivalent in zoology, she undertook doctoral studies at Auckland, obtaining her PhD, supervised by William Roy McGregor and John Morton, on the taxonomy of the Porifera in 1961.
She felt a stable framework of higher level classification which would permit recognition of generic relationships and facilitate descriptions of new species was missing.
[7] She co-authored (with Mary E. Sinclair) The Morphology and Behaviour of Larvae of Some Intertidal Sponges for the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, which was published on 20 October 1967.
[13] Her husband, Peter Bergquist, was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to science, in the 2012 Queen's Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours.