Douglas E. Soltis

Professor Doug Soltis, together with his life partner Professor Pam Soltis, has made fundamental contributions to elucidating the phylogenetic relationships of flowering plants. They have uncovered the genetic bases of floral development and revealed the great importance of polyploidy in plant evolution. They used population genetic tools to crystallize understanding of historical dimensions of North American plant communities and are developing complete phylogenies for the floras of Florida and China. He helped determine that Amborella is basal to all other flowering plants and has spearheaded sequencing of its genome --a yardstick against which all other plant genomes can be assessed.