From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.
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 at the National Museum of Natural History. Cuatrecasas had a distinguished career devoted to systematic botany and plant exploration in tropical South America, especially in the Andes, and this award serves to keep vibrant his accomplishments and memory. The Department of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium present this award at the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium to a botanist and scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. 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.
This year the 19th José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented to Fabián Michelangeli.
Michelangeli earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1993 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and a Ph.D. in 2000 from Cornell University for research on Tococa, a genius of ant plants in Melastomataceae. Since 2004 he has been a curator in the Institute of Systematic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) where he continues his research on Melastomataceae. With about 177 genera and 5,800 species, Melastomataceae is one of the most easily recognized tropical plant families and the Smithsonian and NYBG have some of the world's best collections due to multiple generations of curator research on the family.
Michelangelo has authored or co-authored over 160 publications from book length monographs to large scale phylogenetic studies that have encompassed 70 new species and hundreds of new nomenclature changes. Most recently, he is co-editor with Renato Goldenberg (Universidade Federal do Parana) and Frank Almeda (California Academy of Sciences) of the forthcoming book titled Systematics, Evolution, and Ecology of Melastomataceae, which is due out in July and promises to be a definitive synopsis of worldwide melastome research.
Michelangeli has an active program and field work in Latin America, has advised or co-advised 25 graduate students and postdocs, mostly Latin American students working on melastomes, and has even starred in an IMAX documentary, Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance, about South American table-top mountains called tepuis.
Ken Wurdack presented the medal to Michelangeli at the 19th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, on May 13, 2022.
Past recipients of the Cuatrecasas Medal are Rogers McVaugh from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001); P. Barry Tomlinson from Harvard University (2002); John Beaman from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003); David Mabberley from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney (2004); Jerzy Rzedowski and Graciela Calderón de Rzedowski from Instituto de Ecología del Bajío, Michoacán, Mexico (2005); Sherwin Carlquist from Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Pomona College (2006); Mireya D. Correa A. from the University of Panama and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (2008); Norris H. Williams from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, Gainesville (2009); Beryl B. Simpson from the University of Texas at Austin (2010); Walter S. Judd from the University of Florida at Gainesville (2012); Ana Maria Giulietti Harley from the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Brazil (2013); H. Peter Linder from Zurich University (2014); Paulo Günter Windisch from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2015); Kamal Bawa from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2016); Robin B. Foster from the Field Museum (2017); Alan K. Graham from the Missouri Botanical Garden (2018); Sandra Knapp from the Natural History Museum in London (2019); and Sebsebe Demissew from the Gullele Botanic Garden and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia (2021).
The presentation of the medal and the acceptance by Michelangelo was recorded and is available at NMNH’s Natural History For Scientists YouTube page:
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