I am a botanist at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), where I currently serve as Vice President for Conservation Strategy, Director of NYBG Press and Science Outreach, and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany. My research has been in systematic and economic botany and conservation. In the United States, my systematics research has centered the genus Isoetes (quillworts) in the southeastern U.S., which I studied for my M.S. thesis, and in the tropics on the large, ecologically significant coffee family (Rubiaceae), particularly the genus Isertia, which I studied for my doctoral dissertation. I have written floristic accounts of Rubiaceae at important biodiversity research sites in Amazonian Brazil (Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project) and in French Guiana. I have led or participated in ecological forest inventories in Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana, Bolivia, Guyana, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. In conjunction with several such inventories, I conducted ethnobotanical studies in which I quantified the use of plants by local indigenous people (Chácobo of Amazonian Bolivia and Panare of the Venezuelan Guayana). My recent conservation research has focused on the Caribbean region, particularly in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. My other professional appointments have included serving as president of Torrey Botanical Society, Friends of Taconic State Park (New York State), Association of Systematics Collections, All Species Foundation, and Society for Economic Botany. I have also served on the Board of Directors of The Explorers Club.

I am presently working with colleagues to develop a new citizen science initiative called the New York City EcoFlora Project, of which Prof. E. O. Wilson, a Distinguished Counsellor to the Board of The New York Botanical Garden, has written “In this project, New Yorkers will be trained to observe and record data about plants and their relationships with other organisms, such as pollinators, in the City’s more than 300 parks and other protected natural areas. This trove of original observations and data will be combined with what is already known from natural history collections and scientific publications, resulting in a dynamic online resource to increase informed stewardship of the City’s biodiversity. As I wrote in my most recent book, Half-Earth, ‘Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world.’ The New York City EcoFlora Project will not only prepare the City’s residents to be good biodiversity stewards of their green metropolis, but will also inspire them to gladly embrace such responsibility.”