Academic career
Born Margaret Beth Noye, (but always known just by the first name Beth), Gott won a Trinity College Council Non-Resident Exhibition in 1940, and completed a BSc in botany at the University of Melbourne with first class honours as well as being awarded the Caroline Kay Scholarship in Botany for 1943. She then studied at London University, where her research was the life-cycle of rye cereals. She later undertook research on Australian wheat varieties at the University of Melbourne. Gott initially taught at universities in the United States and Hong Kong prior to working at Monash University from the early 1980s. She developed a comprehensive database of Aboriginal knowledge of Australian food fibre and medicine plants and the landscapes created by Aboriginal management, publishing extensively on the topic, and also established an Aboriginal plant garden at Monash University in 1985.Personal life
Gott's father was a pharmacist and her mother a nurse. Gott was married twice, meeting both husbands while studying at Melbourne University in the early 1940s. Her first husband, Clifford Wilson Serpell (6 November 1915 – 3 March 1944), joined the RAAF as a Flying Officer and was killed during air operations over Burma. She married her second husbandAwards
*1943 – Caroline Kay Scholarship in Botany for 1943. *2017 – Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for "significant service to the biological sciences as an ethnobotanist specialising in the use of native plants by Indigenous people".Select works
.Sources
* '60 Seconds with Beth Gott', Monash Green NewReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gott, Beth 1922 births 2022 deaths Australian women botanists 20th-century Australian botanists 20th-century women scientists 20th-century Australian women Members of the Order of Australia Academic staff of Monash University University of Melbourne alumni Alumni of the University of London Ethnobotanists People from Melbourne