From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.
By Jun Wen.
Former Smithsonian Botany Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow AJ Harris passed away on January 15, 2023, following a long battle against cervical cancer. She was 44 years old. I was extremely saddened to hear this news from her husband Andrew Dabbs, and with a heavy heart I pass the sad news to her Smithsonian Botany colleagues and to many of her friends.
AJ had an impactful career in the field of plant biogeography and evolution where she developed her research integrating plant phylogenetics, biogeography, and biodiversity informatics. She majored in religious studies as an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 2005. She then pursued plant systematics and evolution for her master’s degree at NCSU (2005-2007) with Jenny Xiang as her advisor. She received her doctoral degree in Botany at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in 2015 under the direction of Michael Palmer, with her dissertation research on “Evaluating past and present plant distributions using biodiversity informatics.” I served on her graduate committee at OSU. During her dissertation research, AJ spent ten weeks in at the National Museum of Natural History as a graduate fellow in Botany during the summer of 2014. She was a Smithsonian Botany Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow in 2016-2018. She subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Oberlin College in 2018-2020. AJ accepted an associate professor position in South China Botanical Garden, in Guangzhou, China in 2020.
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