Johanna Westerdijk (Amstelveen, 1883 – Baarn, 1961) Plant pathologist and university professor. As a child, she refused the embroidery tasks that her classmates were forced to do. She told her teacher that she set out to make enough money to pay someone to do it for her. At 17, she enrolled at the University of Amsterdam to attend the classes of Hugo de Vries, a famous botanist of the time, who refused to teach her practical lessons because she was a woman. She researched mosses, tropical fungi and discovered how to combat the Dutch elm disease. She was the first female university professor in the Netherlands, teaching plant pathology at the University of Utrecht and later at the University of Amsterdam. She published more than seventy articles on her research. More than half of her students were women, as she was an active defender of the rights of female university students.