The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 28, No. 3, July 2025.

Lynn G. Clark receives the 22^nd Cuatrecasas Medal

The Department of Botany and the United States National Herbarium present the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany annually at the National Botanical Symposium to a scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. The award is named in honor of Dr. José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist, who spent nearly a half-century working at the National Museum of Natural History. Cuatrecasas had a distinguished career devoted to systematic botany and plant exploration in tropical South America, especially in the Andes, and this award serves to keep vibrant his accomplishments and memory. The award consists of a bronze medal bearing an image of José Cuatrecasas on the front with the recipient’s name and date of presentation on the back.

This year the 22^nd José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented to Lynn C. Clark, an accomplished scientist, botanist, and author.

Clark is the Director of the Ada Hayden Herbarium and a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. More importantly, she is the world’s expert on Neotropical woody bamboos and has conducted extensive field work in Latin America. She is more familiar than most medal recipients with the U.S. National Herbarium because as a local high school student she volunteered during her summer breaks with the late Drs. Thomas Soderstrom and Cleo Calderón, also bamboo experts, on various bamboo collections and projects. 

She received a B.S. (1979) in Botany and Horticulture from Michigan State University, East Lansing followed by a Ph.D. (1986) from Iowa State University where she studied with the late Dr. Richard W. Pohl, also a specialist in tropical woody bamboos. Her dissertation was a monograph of a section of the Neotropical bamboo genus Chusquea (Poaceae). She joined the faculty of Iowa State University in 1987 and has spent the entirety of her professional career there.

In addition to monographs, Clark has published about 120 new species of grass with many Latin American colleagues, and phylogenies that have contributed to a better understanding of bamboo evolution. She is co-author of the book American Bamboos (1999) published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. She is the recipient of numerous teaching and service awards from her university and is richly deserving of wider recognition for her contributions to tropical botany

Laurence Dorr presented the medal to Clark at the 22^nd National Botanical Symposium at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, on May 16, 2025.

Past recipients of the Cuatrecasas Medal are Rogers McVaugh from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001); P. Barry Tomlinson from Harvard University (2002); John Beaman from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003); David Mabberley from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney (2004); Jerzy Rzedowski and Graciela Calderón de Rzedowski from Instituto de Ecología del Bajío, Michoacán, Mexico (2005); Sherwin Carlquist from Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Pomona College (2006); Mireya D. Correa A. from the University of Panama and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (2008); Norris H. Williams from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, Gainesville (2009); Beryl B. Simpson from the University of Texas at Austin (2010); Walter S. Judd from the University of Florida at Gainesville (2012); Ana Maria Giulietti Harley from the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Brazil (2013); H. Peter Linder from Zurich University (2014); Paulo Günter Windisch from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2015); Kamal Bawa from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2016); Robin B. Foster from the Field Museum (2017); Alan K. Graham from the Missouri Botanical Garden (2018); Sandra Knapp from the Natural History Museum in London (2019); Sebsebe Demissew from the Gullele Botanic Garden and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia (2021); Fabián Michelangeli from the New York Botanical Garden (2022); Rafaela Campostrini Forzza from Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023); and Peter F. Stevens from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden (2024).

The presentation of the medal and the acceptance by Lynn Clark was recorded and is available at NMNH’s Natural History For Scientists YouTube: