Director William L. Brown Center

Missouri Botanical Garden (Saint Louis, MO)

I am director of William L. Brown Center (WLBC) at Missouri Botanical Garden, and Curator of Economic Botany. Originally a vegetation ecologist, I focuses now on the interface between plant use, conservation and resource management.

I held university appointments as Assistant Professor at University of Bayreuth (Germany), as Associate Professor and Scientific Director of Lyon Arboretum at University of Hawaii, and as Research Fellow at University of Texas, Austin, and have taught a wide variety of classes in the US, Germany, Africa and Latin America, using English, German, and Spanish as teaching languages. My research interests focus on medicinal plants, neglected crops, wild crop relatives and traditional crop varieties, Seed and Germination Ecology, Natural Resource Management, International law in relation to Intellectual Property Rights, Ecology and Environment, Plant Ecology and Regeneration Ecology, with current projects in Peru, Ecuador, Iran, India, Nepal and Kenya.

1996-2008 Vice President and Scientific Director, Nature and Culture International, Del Mar, CA

2006-2007 Research Fellow, The University of Texas at Austin

2005-2006 Visiting Scholar, The University of Texas at Austin

2003-2006 Scientific Director Lyon Arboretum and Associate Professor, University of Hawaii

1997-2002 Assistant Professor, University of Bayreuth, Germany

1993-1997 Plant Ecologist / Post-doc, University of Bayreuth, Germany

1993-1994 Ph. D. Scholarship in the Topic Research Program “Mechanisms for the maintenance of tropical diversity,” German Research Foundation (DFG)

1992-1993 M.S. Scholarship in the Topic Research Program “Mechanisms for the maintenance of tropical diversity,” German Research Foundation (DFG)