Herman Phaff

Biography

Early life and education

Phaff was born in Winschoten, Netherlands. His family owned a winery where he became interested in the microorganisms involved in brewing beer and fermenting wine. He studied chemical engineering at Technical University Delft, writing a dissertation on the pectinases of Penicillium chrysogenum. On the advice of Albert Kluyver, when he was 26 years old he moved to California to study as a post-graduate at UC Berkeley.

Career

While at Berkeley, Phaff worked in Emil Mrak's laboratory, who is said to have had a major influence on him. When he first arrived, he was most interested in studying fruit juices, but Mrak asked him to work on yeasts, knowing he had worked in Kluyver's laboratory. His PhD was supervised by Maynard Joslyn and focussed on yeast taxonomy, ecology and physiology. After completing his PhD in 1943, he accepted a faculty position at Berkeley, before moving to the food science department of UC Davis in 1954. During the 1950s, he wrote several classic scientific papers, published in Nature on yeast pectinases with Arnold Demain. Whilst at UC Davis, he worked with the Chinese born food scientist, Bor S. Luh. In 1969 he was named University of California at Davis Faculty Research Lecturer. In 1985 he co-authored a definitive book on viticulture with Maynard Amerine. Despite officially retiring in 1983, he maintained a busy laboratory and continued to conduct research daily. His contributions to the study of yeast ecology are unparalleled. At various times in his career he was an editor of several scientific journals including the Yeast Newsletter, the Journal of Bacteriology, the Canadian Journal of Microbiology and the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology.

Species classification

Phaff was a pioneer of using molecular techniques to classify yeasts, along with his colleagues and students, Phaff described over 60 yeast taxa through his career. In 1976, the yeast genus Phaffia (in the Cystofilobasidiaceae family) was isolated from tree exudates and was named after Phaff, by Martin Miller and two Japanese colleagues, in recognition of his contributions to yeast taxonomy and ecology. The species, Phaffia rhodozyma is economically important today because it synthesises the carotenoid pigment, astaxanthin.

In 1997, Yuzo Yamada published Phaffomyces, which is a genus of fungi within the Saccharomycetales order, also named in his honour..