Author: Dennis Wm. Stevenson

DENNIS Wm. STEVENSON was born in rural Ohio in 1942 and raised on a farm. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Ohio State University. As a senior student, he met Dr Knut Norstog who introduced him to the field of cycad biology. In 1975, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis. From there he spent four years at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden as a Harvard University Fellow, interspersed with a year as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. From 1980 to 1987 he was on the faculty at Barnard College of Columbia University, after which he joined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden, a position he held for over 35 years. He has published extensively in the areas of cycad palaeobotany, reproductive biology, anatomy, cytology, molecular systematics and genomics, as well as compiling taxonomic monographs on cycads for various floras. He has been responsible for raising major funding for projects in plant molecular systematics, and plant genomics. He has published over 400 papers in scientific and journals with 170 of those on cycads, edited four volumes on cycad biology and co-authored a textbook entitled “Plant Anatomy: An Applied Approach” and has been the editor of Botanical Review for 30 years. He has conducted extensive field work studies and has been a member of the IUCN’s Cycad Specialist Group since its inception and has been actively involved with each of the International Conferences on Cycad Biology. ROY OSBORNE was born in London, England, in 1944. He was schooled in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, before studying botany and chemistry at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, during which time he first became acquainted with cycads in theory and in habitat. He continued with postgraduate studies in natural products chemistry at the University of kwa Zulu-Natal in Durban, and in botany at the Pietermaritzburg campus of the same institution. In 1984, he discovered, characterized and named the triterpenoid compound, jessic acid, from the Zimbabwean tree Combretum eleagnoides. His Ph.D. thesis, completed in 1988, relates to cycad culture and phytochemistry. From 1979–1995, Roy lectured in the Faculties of Architecture, Engineering, Medicine and Science at the University of kwa Zulu-Natal. He served on the Board of Durban Botanic Gardens and was founder and first President of the Cycad Society of South Africa. Roy and his family emigrated to Australia in 1996 where he joined a scientific arm of Queensland Government. He has published over 200 papers in scientific and popular journals and is co-author of “Cycads of Australia” (2001) and “Cycads of Vietnam” (2007). He is a long-serving member of the IUCN’s Cycad Specialist Group and has been involved with many of the International Conferences on Cycad Biology.