Willem Marius Docters van Leeuwen

Willem Marius Docters van Leeuwen (16 March 1880 – 25 February 1960) was a Dutch botanist and entomologist who worked in the Dutch colony in Indonesia, where he was prominent for conducting studies on insect–plant interactions as well as for his long-term studies on the island of Krakatoa.

W.M.D. van Leeuwen in 1929

Van Leeuwen was born in Batavia, Indonesia and was educated at the University of Amsterdam. He graduated in 1905 and received a PhD in 1907. He went to Salatiga, Central Java as an entomologist in 1908 and was also a school teacher in Semarang and later Bandung. He studied galls, ant–plant symbioses, pollination biology, montane flora and floral succession on the islands of Krakatoa over the course of a long period.^[1] He collaborated with his wife, Jenny Docters van Leeuwen-Reijnvaan, on several publications on plant galls.^[2] In 1918 he became director of the Bogor Botanical Gardens, working until 1932. He took part in the American-Dutch expedition into New Guinea in 1926. He returned to the Netherlands in 1932 and settled in Leersum. He published the results of his studies as a monograph "Krakatau 1883-1933" in 1936. He served as a professor of tropical biology at the University of Amsterdam from 1942 to 1950, where he was popularly known as "uncle doc".^[3][4]