From Plant Press Vol. 16 no. 3, July 2013
By Warren L. Wagner
In the October 2011 issue of The Plant Press I wrote in this column honoring 204 years of
service by six staff who were retiring. Over the next several months the
Department of Botany developed a staffing plan to fill the most critical
positions in the department left by these retirements and other gaps resulting
from earlier retirements or new approaches to our work. In the October 2012
issue we reported the staff changes and hires for the department’s information
technology group (Sylvia Orli as head and Ingrid Pol-Yin Lin in a new
multi-media position). In the January 2013 issue we reported on the new
collections staff that had been hired (Melinda Peters and Meghann Toner). I am
delighted to report here the recent recruitment of two research scientists and
curators to the department.
Dr. Ashley N. Egan (Assistant Professor and Herbarium
Curator; East Carolina University) will join the National Museum of Natural
History’s Department of Botany as Curator of Legumes in August 2013. Egan
received her doctoral degree from Brigham Young University in 2006 under the
direction of Keith Crandall, and had her postdoctoral training at Cornell
University in Jeff Doyle’s lab. Egan is a systematic biologist with strong
expertise in phylogenomics and bioinformatics. Her research integrates field
work, phylogenetic theory, genomics and bioinformatics in tackling various
complex systematic and polyploidy problems in legume plants, one of the largest
plant families of flowering plants, and one in which the US National Herbarium
has strong holdings. Her publication record is excellent with publications in a
wide variety of journals including the high impact Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Systematic Biology, BMC Biology, and New
Phytologist. She is a collection-based researcher who has described new
species and a new genus, and contributed treatments for the Flora of North
America project. She has already established herself as an expert of next-generation
sequencing approaches in plant evolutionary biology.
Dr. Eric Schuettpelz (Assistant Professor, University of
North Carolina Wilmington) will join the NMNH Department of Botany as Curator
of Ferns in August 2013. Schuettpelz is an evolutionary biologist well-known
for his work on fern systematics and diversifications. He received is doctoral
degree at Duke University under the direction of Kathleen Pryer in 2007. He had
his postdoctoral training at Duke University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis
Center. The US National Herbarium has the best collection of fern specimens in
the world, so Schuettpelz’s program will be a great fit to our collections’
strengths. His publication record is excellent with publications in a wide
variety of high impact journals: Nature,
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, Systematic Biology, and Evolution. His research has been
collection-based and he has made valuable and important contributions to the
field of systematics and evolutionary biology of ferns. Moreover he has
contributed to the new family-level classification of ferns, and published new
combinations and clarified species delimitations.
When the National Museum of Natural History opened its
doors in 1910, the botany staff had four curators. With the forthcoming
addition of two new research scientists, the number of curators in the
Department of Botany will be at 13, a bit smaller than the peak of 20 curators
in the early 1990s. The addition of Egan and Schuettpelz to the staff will
allow the Botany Department to remain a strong a vibrant unit within NMNH, will
add research programs for major taxonomic groups worldwide, and will provide
expertise and curation for some of our strongest collections.
