Johanna Westerdijk (Amstelveen, 1883 – Baarn, 1961) Plant pathologist and university professor. In her childhood, she refused to do the embroidery tasks that her schoolmates did. She told her teacher that she would earn money when she grew up so that she could hire someone to do them for her. At the age of 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 give her practical lessons because she was a woman, researched mosses, tropical fungi and discovered how to fight the Dutch elm disease. She was the first woman university professor in the Netherlands, as professor of plant pathology at the University of Utrecht and later at the University of Amsterdam, publishing more than seventy articles with her research. More than half of her students were women, and she was an active advocate for the rights of university women.