Mendel is known as the father of what field?

Mendel is known as the father of genetics. His experiments with garden peas established principles explaining how inherited traits pass from parents to offspring, helping found the modern scientific study of heredity.

Between roughly 1856 and 1863, Mendel cultivated and crossed pea plants at St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brno. He tracked visible traits across generations and counted offspring instead of relying only on qualitative descriptions. From these results, he proposed that inherited characteristics were controlled by discrete units, which he called “factors.” Scientists now understand these units as genes, with alternative forms called alleles.

Mendel presented his work in 1865 and published it in 1866 under the title “Experiments on Plant Hybridization.” His conclusions attracted little attention at first. Around 1900, several scientists independently rediscovered similar inheritance patterns, bringing Mendel’s work into the foundation of modern genetics.

Heredity is closely related but is not the usual name for the field. Heredity describes the transmission of traits, whereas genetics is the broader scientific discipline that studies genes, inheritance, and variation. Mendel was also a botanist and biologist, but those are broader or adjacent fields rather than the canonical answer.