American botanist, palynologist, botanical collector and photographer.
Joan W. Nowicke (born 1938) is an American botanist from St. Louis, Missouri. She worked 27 years for the Smithsonian Institution, between 1972 and 1999, in the Department of Botany, from the National Museum of Natural History. Nowicke is a global reference as a palynologist, mainly due to her specialization in pollen morphology and its relationship with systematics, in addition to her extensive work in the area of Caryophyllales palynotaxonomy. She co-authored a 1984 paper entitled, "Yellow rain - a palynological analysis". At the time, yellow rain was thought to be a form of toxin warfare by