Jepson Herbarium Public Programs

About Our Instructors

James D. Ackerman is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and Director of the UPRRP Herbarium and Zoology Museum, where he has been employed since 1981. He received his BA (1973) and MA (1976) from Humboldt State University, and his PhD (1981) from Florida State University under the direction of Norris Williams and co-mentored by Robert Dressler at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. His research activities have included palynology, taxonomy, floristics, population genetics, pollination, biogeography, ecology and evolution of Orchidaceae; and euglossine bee biology, tropical botany, epiphyte ecology, and the ecology of biological invasions.

Bruce G. Baldwin is Curator Emeritus of the Jepson Herbarium and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Bruce received his PhD in botany at UC Davis in 1989. His research emphasizes systematics (including the use of biosystematic, molecular, and phylogenetic methods) of Californian vascular-plant groups, especially our native Compositae. Since Bruce arrived at UC Berkeley in 1994, he has been the Convening Editor of the Jepson Flora Project, which has produced The Jepson Desert Manual (2002), the second edition of The Jepson Manual (2012), and the online Jepson eFlora, including Revisions 1-13.

Heath Bartosh is Founder and Principal Botanist of Nomad Ecology, based in Martinez, California; and a Research Associate at the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley. As Nomad’s Principal Botanist, Heath ensures his staff are properly trained in plant identification and rare plant survey methodologies. After graduating from Humboldt State University, Heath began his career as a professional botanist in 2002 and has been an earnest student of the California flora for nearly 20 years. His research interests are in California vascular plant floristics with a focus on the California Coast Ranges and the fire-following annual plant species found there. His research on post-fire floras focuses on the composition and duration of the eruptive dominance and subsequent fleeting abundance of annual plant species at regional scales within the California Coast Ranges. In 2009, he also became a member of the Rare Plant Program Committee at the state level of CNPS, helping to develop current and accurate information on the distribution, ecology, and conservation status of California's rare and endangered plants and promoting the use of this information to influence plant conservation in California.

Linda Beidleman has an MS in biology from Rice University. She is co-author of Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region and Plants of Rocky Mountain National Park. She has worked with the California Native Plant Society and taught short flora courses for the Jepson Herbarium, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies.

Nuri Benet-Pierce has an M.A. from Stanford University. After a career in telecommunications, her interests shifted, leading her to complete several college courses in biology and botany. After working in Dr. Michael Simpson’s lab and the Herbarium at San Diego State University on a voluntary basis, she was officially accepted as a Research Associate in the Department of Biology. Nuri’s introduction to taxonomic research was a publication on the monocot family Haemodoraceae, but she has spent much of the past 18 years deeply involved in advancing the taxonomy of the genus Chenopodium. She has to date published four research articles and described 13 new species in the genus. She has made transformative changes in Chenopodium taxonomy by focusing on details of fruit morphology, largely ignored by previous workers in the group.

Bill Buck is Senior Curator Emeritus from the New York Botanical Garden. He retired at the end of 2016 after working at NYBG for 38 years. He was a student of Howard Crum. His primary interest is in moss phylogeny and he used morphology to speculate on the subject, prior to the use of molecular data. He also has done extensive floristic research. His fieldwork has taken him around the world, including China, Japan, Australia, southern Africa, Europe, but with an emphasis on North and South America. His best-known publication is the 1998 Pleurocarpous mosses of the West Indies. Bill has three moss genera, 11 moss species, nine lichens, 2 lichenicolous fungi and 1 liverwort named for him.

J. Travis Columbus is a Research Scientist at California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden) and Professor of Botany at Claremont Graduate University. He earned his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he studied Bouteloua (Poaceae) and related taxa. His current research focuses on the evolution and classification of grasses and buckwheats (Polygonaceae).

Susan Fawcett is Curator of Ferns and Research Botanist at the University and Jepson Herbaria. Before pursuing a masters and PhD in botany, she studied fine art, graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy and University of Michigan School of Art and Design, and with an emphasis on scientific illustration. She has been working professionally as a scientific illustrator for 20 years, and teaches botany and illustration at the University of Michigan Biological Station. As a taxonomist and free-lance artist, she has illustrated numerous species new to science. She has always loved to combine her background and training in fine art with plant biology, incorporating it into her work as a scientist. As a botanist, her research involves molecular phylogenetics, and she specializes in ferns, especially the family Thelypteridaceae, the Hawaiian palm genus Pritchardia, and the floras of California, the Great Lakes Region, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.

J. Keith Gilless is the Interim Director of the University and Jepson Herbaria, a Professor Emeritus of Forest Economics, and the former Dean of the Rausser College of Natural Resources. He is a member of the faculty of both the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He is also a former Faculty Director of the Berkeley Forests and ESPM’s Summer Session Forestry Field Camp taught on the Plumas National Forest.

Eric Harris has taught multiple courses in botany, most recently Introduction to California Plant Life and Origins and Evolution of Food Plants through the Integrative Biology Department at UC Berkeley. Eric has a PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley and works at SureHarvest, a company that specializes in consulting and software solutions for sustainable agriculture.

Nina House is Managing Editor of the Jepson eFlora and a Coordinator for the Jepson Public Programs. She received her Botany M.S. from the California Botanic Garden (Claremont Graduate University). Her thesis was a floristic inventory of the Manter and Salmon Creek watersheds in the southern Sierra Nevada, Tulare County, California. She has served in multiple leadership roles, including President of Society of Herbarium Curators Early Career Section (2024) and President of Southern California Botanists (2021-2023). Nina is passionate about the intersection between plant conservation and science communication.

Ayn Shlisky Hunt is a terrestrial ecologist specializing in landscape-level ecosystem assessment and modeling, and design of restoration strategies to achieve ecological sustainability. She turned her forestry and range education at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D, M.S., B.S.) into a 40-year career in forestry, fire, conservation and research with the US Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy and currently the Institute for Natural Resources at Oregon State University.

Leigh Johnson is a professor of Biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he teaches courses related to plant diversity and plant systematics. He is also curator of the university’s vascular plant herbarium. His research interests include phylogeography, conservation, and species delimitation, with taxonomic expertise in the phlox family, particularly Collomia and Navarretia. He is a student of the California flora, which he traverses as often as practical in the summer months, with additional field work throughout the western U.S. and Patagonia. .

Jon Keeley is currently a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, stationed at Sequoia National Park. Prior to this appointment, he served one year in Washington, D.C. as director of the ecology program for the National Science Foundation. He was professor of biology at Occidental College for 20 years and spent a sabbatical year at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has more than 350 publications in national and international scientific journals and books. His research has focused on ecological impacts of wildfires as well as other aspects of plant ecology, including rare plants, rare habitats such as vernal pools, and plant physiology. In 1985 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and an Honorary Lifetime Member of the California Botanical Society. He has served on the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning Environmental Review Board, and the State of California Natural Communities Conservation Program (NCCP) Board of Scientific Advisors.

David Keil received his BS (1968) and MS (1970) from Arizona State University and PhD (1973) from Ohio State University. He was a biology professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo for 39 years, teaching courses in general botany, plant taxonomy, field botany, and biogeography, while also serving as Director of the Robert F. Hoover Herbarium. His field studies have resulted in over 38,000 collection numbers, and most of the specimens are housed in the Hoover Herbarium. Dave has made significant contributions to The Jepson Manual Project. He authored the Key to California Plant Families and served as the editor and primary author of the Asteraceae in both editions of The Jepson Manual (1993, 2012). He was one of the editors for the second edition of the manual and continues to serve as an editor of the Jepson eFlora. He has also edited Madroño and Systematic Botany Monographs. Four taxa have been named in Dave’s honor: Ancistrocarphus keilii Morefield, Erigeron inornatus (A. Gray) A. Gray var. keilii G.L. Nesom, Wedelia keilii B.L. Turner, and Chrysanthellum keilii B.L. Turner. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the California Native Plant Society. He is first author of the newly published second edition of Vascular Plants of San Luis Obispo County, California (2023).

Julie Kierstead (formerly known as Julie Nelson) served as Forest Botanist for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest from 1989-2019. Julie, along with Heath, has been a member of the state CNPS Rare Plant Program Committee for many years. She also serves as a Calflora board member, and is a botanical Research Associate at the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley, as well as the California Academy of Sciences. Julie graduated from Oregon State University with a B.S. in Botany and from Northern Arizona University with an M.S. in Biology. Her interests lie mostly in floristics, systematics, and conservation of rare vascular plants in northern California and southern Oregon. She lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Staci Markos is Associate Director at the University and Jepson Herbaria. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley studying the evolutionary patterns in Lessingia (Asteraceae). She was the project manager for the second edition of The Jepson Manual (2012) and now serves as an editor of the Jepson eFlora. She also serves as co-chair for the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH), a role she has had since the CCH originated in 2003. Staci is an advocate for building educational resources that share information about the vascular plants of California and has a leading role in the Jepson Workshop program and the Jepson Videos. She is also responsible for procuring funds for the Herbaria including the annual fund, grant writing, and building the endowment funds.

Jim Morefield found love at first sight for the White Mountains while attending Deep Springs College 1979-1981, which was followed by a BS in Botany and Geology at Northern Arizona University in 1986, and PhD in Systematic Botany, focusing on Stylocline and other Asteraceae, at Claremont Graduate University in 1992. He spent the next 30 years as Lead Botanist for the Nevada Division of Natural Heritage, and, in retirement, continues to pursue interests in the flora of the White Mountains, rare plants of the Great Basin, and the desert flora of North America. He contributed treatments of several genera of Asteraceae for both the Jepson Manual and the Flora of North America North of Mexico.

Robert Naczi is a plant systematist whose research focuses on the flora of North America, plant conservation, sedges (Cyperaceae), and Western Hemisphere Pitcher Plants (Sarraceniaceae). Rob uses a multi-pronged approach in his research, incorporating field, herbarium, and laboratory methods. His fieldwork has given him first-hand knowledge of the plant life of much of North America. He and collaborators are writing a comprehensive account of the Northeast’s spontaneous plants, New Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada. He is lead editor of Sedges: Uses, Diversity, and Systematics of the Cyperaceae (2008). Also, he has authored >65 papers on sedge systematics, biogeography, and conservation. Robert earned the B.S. in Biology from St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, and the Ph.D. in Botany from University of Michigan.

Mare Nazaire is the Curator of the Herbarium at California Botanic Garden and Assistant Professor at Claremont Graduate University. She received her Ph.D. in botany from Washington State University in 2013. Mare has worked as a botanist for over 20 years in locations throughout the United States, including New England, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Her research focuses on the systematics and biogeography of Mertensia (Boraginaceae), floristics of California, and aquatic vascular plants. She is a Taxon Editor for the Flora of North America (FNA) overseeing families Lamiaceae and Hydrophyllaceae, and has authored several treatments for FNA.

Dylan Neubauer is a self-taught, self-employed botanist and botanical editor based in Santa Cruz, where she authored the vascular plant checklist for the county. She has been lucky enough to spend ten summers living and botanizing in the glorious White Mountains, and has been a co-instructor on four Jepson Workshops there. Since 2015, she has been working on an annotated checklist of vascular plants in the vicinity of the UC White Mountain Research Center Crooked Creek Station and over that time has made ca. 1,300 botanical collections in the area.

Tom Parker is an ecologist who works with plant community dynamics. He was trained at the University of Texas (B.A.) and UC Santa Barbara (M.A., Ph.D.) and is currently a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. His research emphasizes plant community dynamics, especially dispersal, seed banks, and seedling establishment. His current projects focus on mycorrhizal fungal mutualists, seed dispersal, and wetland ecology. His research in chaparral forced him to be able to identify Arctostaphylos species, and he's enjoyed them ever since. His serious collecting and systematics work began more than 25 years ago

Brody Sandel is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Santa Clara University. His research areas include grassland restoration, functional ecology, global change ecology and macroecology, with a particular focus on grasses. In the spring, you can find him carefully removing leaves from grasses or keying out new finds in parks and reserves from Point Reyes to Mount Hamilton.

Christian Schwarz is an educator and naturalist from California. Although he primarily spends his time seeking, photographing, collecting, teaching about, and publishing research on North American macrofungi, he is passionate about biodiversity in general, and especially the 'big pictures' of ecology, evolution, and biogeography. He has co-authored two field guides — Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast and Mushrooms of Cascadia (both with Noah Siegel). He is a research associate of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, as well as the Ken Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, where he has taught undergraduate courses in mycology and community science.

Jim Shevock is a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences, University Herbarium, UC Berkeley and the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kaua’i. He collaborated with Dan Norris on the study of California mosses culminating in the 2004 publication Contributions toward a bryoflora of California part 1: A specimen-based catalogue of mosses, and part 2: A key to the mosses published in Madroño 51: 1-269. His plant collections, over 65,000 specimens, are at the herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) with selected duplicates provided to major bryophyte herbaria around the world. The majority of his international field work has occurred in China, Taiwan and the Philippines. Jim has seven flowering plants, eight mosses and two liverworts named in his honor included the moss genera Rheoshevockia and Shevockia,both first discovered in Yunnan Province, China.

Michael G. Simpson is a Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Diego State University (SDSU) and curator of the SDSU Herbarium. His areas of expertise are plant taxonomy, plant systematics, and floristics. His research has centered on the monocot family Haemodoraceae, and his current research focus is on the biogeography, evolution, and taxonomy of the subtribe Amsinckiinae or the family Boraginaceae. He also studies biogeographic patterns and processes of plants with an American amphitropical distribution (AAD), those occurring in North America and South America but not in the intervening tropics. Dr. Simpson currently coordinates and co-teaches “Field Botany of San Diego County.” He is author of the widely used textbook Plant Systematics (Elsevier-Academic Press, 2006; 3rd edition 2019).

Michael Vasey is Director of the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and Associate Director for Science Engagement for the Estuary and Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, M.A. in Ecology and Systematic Biology from San Francisco State University, and Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz. Mike has been focusing on the systematic relationships in Arctostaphylos for more than 25 years. As part of a team effort, Mike has made major contributions in developing the evolutionary context in which Arctostaphylos can be better understood and in unraveling species relationships within this challenging genus.

Scott White recently retired from a long career as a consulting biologist. He holds both a BA and an MA degree from Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt). Scott is a former President of the Southern California Botanists and former co-editor of the journal Crossosoma. He is a co-author of The Vascular Plants of Western Riverside County and a Research Associate at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. He was an original member of the CNPS Vegetation Committee. He has been conducting floristic surveys throughout southern California since 1987. In retirement, he is focusing on his favorite long-term project, a vouchered flora of the San Jacinto Mountains, based on herbarium specimens and his own collections.