Dr. Dennis Stevenson with Dasypogon hookeri, locally known as the pineapple bush
I spent the month of November 2013 in Australia on fieldwork for a project on the coevolution of certain plant groups and the specialized wasps that pollinate them. The plan was to collect the plants with their pollinators in the act, and to that end, I was accompanied by an entomologist, Dr. James Carpenter of the American Museum of Natural History. We also had collaborators from various herbaria and natural history museums across the continent.
The itinerary was a drive of more than 3,000 miles from Adelaide in South Australia to Brisbane in Queensland, following the River Murray in South Australia and then another river, the Darling, to Broken Hill, a mining city in New South Wales. From there, our route took us to Bourke, then Cunnamulla, and east to Brisbane. At both the start and end of the itinerary there was rain, so late spring flowers were in full bloom. But in between, things did not go quite according to plan because the Outback was in deep drought. In Cunnamulla, a police officer told us it had been more than a year since the last rainfall!
As the longtime Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, Barbara M. Thiers, Ph.D., already had a demanding job as the head of one of the world’s four largest collections of preserved plant specimens. But recently she added a new title—and new responsibilities—when she was named Vice President for Science Administration at The New York Botanical Garden.
In that role, she oversees all staff, programmatic initiatives, and operations in the Botanical Garden’s Science Division, one of the leading centers for studying plants at all levels, from the whole organism down to its DNA.
The promotion has made her one of the few women ever to lead scientific research at a major botanical institution.
I recently sat down with Dr. Thiers in her office on the fourth floor of the Garden’s Library building for a conversation about her life and career, including how she spent many of her weekends as a child and how long it took her to decide she wanted to stay at the Garden after her arrival as a postdoctoral intern in 1981.
