Judd Receives 10th Cuatrecasas Medal

From Plant Press Vol. 15, No. 3 from 2012

Walter Judd, Professor of Botany at the the University of Florida at Gainesville, accepts the 2012 José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany from Laurence Dorr (Chair of the Cuatrecasas medal selection committee). (Photo by Ken Wurdack)

The Department of Botany and the United States National Herbarium present this award to a botanist and scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. The José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany is named in honor of Dr. José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist, who spent nearly a half-century working in the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Botany. Dr. Cuatrecasas devoted his career to plant exploration in tropical South America and this award serves to keep vibrant the accomplishments and memory of this outstanding scientist.

The winner of this prestigious award is selected by a committee made up of three botanists on the staff of the Department in consultation with other plant scientists outside of the Smithsonian Institution. Nominations for the Medal are accepted from all scientists in the Botany Department. The award consists of a bronze medal bearing an image of José Cuatrecasas on the front with the recipient’s name and date of presentation on the back. Highlights from past presentations to the recipients are available on the Symposium Archives at http://botany.si.edu/events/sbsarchives/.

Walter S. Judd is the 10^th recipient of the 2012 José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany. Judd, a Professor of Botany at the University of Florida at Gainesville, was selected for this honor as he has made many important contributions to tropical Botany through his research, field work, and teaching. He received a B.S. (1973) and M.S. (1974) from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1978). His doctoral dissertation was a revision of the genus Lyonia (Ericaceae) and field work in Hispaniola undertaken in support of this research first introduced him to the high mountain flora of the Caribbean. Since then Judd has established himself as one of the world’s experts in the Ericaceae, a family well-known in temperate and boreal regions but also well-represented in the tropics. Judd’s trips to the Caribbean also incited an interest in the almost exclusively tropical Melastomataceae, and the species-rich Miconeae of this plant family has been another long-standing focus of his systematic research. Not all of his research contributions, however, are restricted to these two families as Judd also made general collections in Hispaniola and prepared a number of floristic inventories for national parks in Haiti. For many years he has been one of the principals in the “Generic flora of the Southeastern United States” project, which although focused on a more or less temperate flora does treat tropical elements that occur in southern Florida and generally requires knowledge of tropical relatives of temperate genera.

Judd has always incorporated phylogenetic considerations into his revisionary work and with several co-authors he has incorporated these ideas into one of the most widely used text books in our discipline, Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach (1999-2008). The text book, translated into at least five languages and now in its third edition, is utilized in over 150 universities world-wide. Judd has had a strong influence on tropical Botany through his teaching and he has supervised more than 30 graduate students at the University of Florida. Many of these students have made and continue to make their own contributions to tropical Botany. Finally, Judd has for many years taught a summer course in “Tropical Botany” in suburban Miami, utilizing the extensive living tropical plants found at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, The Kampong of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Montgomery Botanical Center.

Past recipients of the Cuatrecasas Medal are Rogers McVaugh of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001); P. Barry Tomlinson of Harvard University (2002); John Beaman of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003); David Mabberley of the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney (2004); Jerzy Rzedowski and Graciela Calderón de Rzedowski of Instituto de Ecología del Bajío, Michoacán, Mexico (2005); Sherwin Carlquist of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Pomona College (2006); Mireya D. Correa A. of the University of Panama and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (2008); Norris H. Williams of the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, Gainesville (2009); and Beryl B. Simpson of the University of Texas at Austin (2010).