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DEPARTMENT OF BOTANY
The Plant Press
From The Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 3, July 2023.
Rafaela Campostrini Forzza receives the 20th Cuatrecasas Medal
The José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany 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 Department of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium present this award at the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium to a botanist and scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. 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 20th José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented to Rafaela Campostrini Forzza, an accomplished scientist, science administrator, and educator.
Forzza earned an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora and a Master’s and PhD in Biological Sciences (Botany) from Universidade de São Paulo. Since 2002, she has been a researcher at the Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro and curator of the Herbário Dimitri Sucre.
Her impact has been impressive on several different scales. She has contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the Brazilian flora through her leadership role in Reflora (a virtual herbarium for images of Brazilian plants housed in foreign herbaria), which has transformed floristic research in Brazil and spurred an amazing amount of research activity in plant systematics, taxonomy, and conservation in South America’s largest country. In addition to managing this Herculean task, which involved sending students to image Brazilian specimens in foreign herbaria (including four hosted here in the U.S. National Herbarium), creating nomenclatural and specimen databases for the Brazilian flora, and coordinating a checklist of the plants and fungi of Brazil, her personal research on Bromeliaceae and related families often in conjunction with students also has been rich and of the highest caliber. In addition to phylogenetic research, she has authored or co-authored close to 100 species of Bromeliaceae publications, including Encholirium agavoides.
Laurence Dorr presented the medal to Forzza at the 20th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, on May 19, 2023.
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); and Fabián Michelangeli from the New York Botanical Garden (2022).