Sandra Knapp

Sandy Knapp is a leader in the field of global biodiversity and tropical botany. She has produced a broad and extensive array of scientific work, involving both taxonomic issues and flora projects, as well as more general biological projects of conservation biology, pollination and phylogeny, hybridization between genera, evolution of ribosomal DNA, genomics in tomato and tobacco, and biodiversity informatics. Knapp is an expert on the nightshade family (including potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants), working to understand the diversity, evolution, and distribution of these globally important plants.  She has also overseen the international collaborative project Flora Mesoamericana--a synoptic inventory of some 18,000 species of plants of southern Mexico and Central America. She is a passionate advocate for the importance of basic taxonomic work describing life on Earth, and for the importance of natural history collections as critical infrastructures for modern science far beyond the uses for which they were assembled. Her work has been recognized by the Linnean Medal for Botany, the Peter Raven Outreach Award for public engagement with science, and the John Burnett Medal for her work in biodiversity.