2014, Dr. Jan Salick

Jan Salick, Ph.D. is the Alice H. Brown Curator of Ethnobotany for the William L. Brown Center of the Missouri Botanical Garden. She has held numerous visiting scholar fellowships around the world including the University of Oxford, Ethnobotany Fellowship. After earning a Ph.D. from Cornell University working on ecology and systematics, she was a post-doctoral researcher at The New York Botanical Garden where she focused on Amazonian ethnobotany. Since then, she has steadily served as a leader in ethnobotany with global field studies and training many students. Her research has steadily driven to improve the quality of science in ethnobotany with her high quality publications (e.g., Economic Botany, PNAS, Global Environmental Change, AJB) and grants (e.g., NSF, Ford Foundation, National Geographic Society) being peer-reviewed evidence of her success. Early projects involved study of cassava and indigenous agriculture, more recent work has been on climate change in Tibetan communities, and now she is shifting her focus to examine impacts of climate change on Native American communities. She has been particularly active as an international representative for the science of ethnobotany within committees of the International Union of Biological Sciences, CGIAR, United Plant Savers, and People and Plants International. She founded and has developed the Biocultural Collections Network that has just released a new handbook on Curating Biocultural Collections. Most importantly, she is a past president of the Society for Economic Botany and a long-standing member and supporter of our society.