Pamela S. Soltis

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Pamela S. Soltis
Born (1957-11-13) November 13, 1957 (age 65)
Nelsonville, Ohio
NationalityAmerican
Other namesPamela Sagraves
Alma mater University of Kansas
Spouse Douglas E. Soltis
Awards Darwin–Wallace Medal (2016)
Scientific career
FieldsBotany
Institutions
Author abbrev. (botany) P.S.Soltis

Pamela Soltis (born November 13, 1957) is an American botanist. She is a distinguished professor at the University of Florida, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, principal investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics and Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, [1] and founding director of the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Soltis was born on November 13, 1957, in Nelsonville, Ohio, to Barbara D. Sagraves and Walter Ronald Sagraves. [3] She attended Pella High School in Pella, Iowa, and graduated in 1976 as valedictorian. She was a National Merit Finalist in 1976. She earned her bachelor's degree in biology from Central College in 1980 and graduated summa cum laude. She then attended University of Kansas and earned an M.Phil. with honors in botany in 1984 and a Ph.D. in botany in 1986. [3]

Career

After earning her Ph.D., Soltis started as an assistant professor in the Department of Botany at Washington State University in 1986 and was promoted to associate professor in 1992. [3] She was then promoted in full professor in the Department of Botany and School of Biological Sciences in 1998. In 2000 Soltis moved from Washington State University to University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History as curator. At the University of Florida, Soltis was University of Florida Research Foundation Research Professor from 2006 to 2009 and co-director of the UF Computational Biology Program from 2009 to 2012. [3]

Research

Soltis' research has focused on the patterns and processes that generated the tree of life. More specifically, she studies the flowering plant (angiosperm) diversity and evolution. She uses genomic methods, natural history collections and computational modeling to understand the phylogeny, phylogeography, and polyploidy of angiosperms. [4] She has published over 400 scientific papers, and among her most cited contributions are papers on the role of genetic and genomic attributes in the success of polyploids. [5] In 2016, Soltis was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

Service

Soltis was president of the Botanical Society of America 2007–08. [6] She has served on the Councils of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the American Genetics Association, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. She served a three-year term as secretary of the Botanical Society of America and is currently the president of the Society of Systematic Biologists. She also serves as an associate editor for the journals Evolution and Systematic Biology. [4] She is a member of the University of Kansas Women's Hall of Fame. [7]

Honors

She was the winner of the 2002 Dahlgren Prize in Botany from the Royal Physiographic Society of Sweden. [7] Reuters named her as a highly cited researcher in 2014. [8] She won, along with her husband, Douglas Soltis, [9] the 2006 Asa Gray Award. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. [10]

Selected publications

Scientific publications

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurales</span> Order of flowering plants

The Laurales are an order of flowering plants. They are magnoliids, related to the Magnoliales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malpighiales</span> Eudicot order of flowering plants

The Malpighiales comprise one of the largest orders of flowering plants, containing about 36 families and more than 16,000 species, about 7.8% of the eudicots. The order is very diverse, containing plants as different as the willow, violet, poinsettia, manchineel, rafflesia and coca plant, and are hard to recognize except with molecular phylogenetic evidence. It is not part of any of the classification systems based only on plant morphology. Molecular clock calculations estimate the origin of stem group Malpighiales at around 100 million years ago (Mya) and the origin of crown group Malpighiales at about 90 Mya.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saxifragales</span> Order of Eudicot flowering plants in the Superrosid clade

The Saxifragales (saxifrages) are an order of flowering plants (Angiosperms). They are an extremely diverse group of plants which include trees, shrubs, perennial herbs, succulent and aquatic plants. The degree of diversity in terms of vegetative and floral features makes it difficult to define common features that unify the order.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornales</span> Order of flowering plants

The Cornales are an order of flowering plants, early diverging among the asterids, containing about 600 species. Plants within the Cornales usually have four-parted flowers, drupaceous fruits, and inferior to half-inferior gynoecia topped with disc-shaped nectaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nymphaeales</span> Order of flowering plants

The Nymphaeales are an order of flowering plants, consisting of three families of aquatic plants, the Hydatellaceae, the Cabombaceae, and the Nymphaeaceae. It is one of the three orders of basal angiosperms, an early-diverging grade of flowering plants. At least 10 morphological characters unite the Nymphaeales. One of the traits is the absence of a vascular cambium, which is required to produce both xylem (wood) and phloem, which therefore are missing. Molecular synapomorphies are also known.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monocotyledon</span> Important clade of flowering plants

Monocotyledons, commonly referred to as monocots, are grass and grass-like flowering plants (angiosperms), the seeds of which typically contain only one embryonic leaf, or cotyledon. They constitute one of the major groups into which the flowering plants have traditionally been divided; the rest of the flowering plants have two cotyledons and are classified as dicotyledons, or dicots.

<i>Amborella</i> Species of shrub

Amborella is a monotypic genus of understory shrubs or small trees endemic to the main island, Grande Terre, of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. The genus is the only member of the family Amborellaceae and the order Amborellales and contains a single species, Amborella trichopoda. Amborella is of great interest to plant systematists because molecular phylogenetic analyses consistently place it as the sister group to all other flowering plants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ulmaceae</span> Family of flowering plants

The Ulmaceae are a family of flowering plants that includes the elms, and the zelkovas. Members of the family are widely distributed throughout the north temperate zone, and have a scattered distribution elsewhere except for Australasia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hamamelidaceae</span> Witch-hazel, a shrub or small tree

Hamamelidaceae, commonly referred to as the witch-hazel family, is a family of flowering plants in the order Saxifragales. The clade consists of shrubs and small trees positioned within the woody clade of the core Saxifragales. An earlier system, the Cronquist system, recognized Hamamelidaceae in the Hamamelidales order.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angiosperm Phylogeny Group</span> Collaborative research group for the classification of flowering plants

The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) is an informal international group of systematic botanists who collaborate to establish a consensus on the taxonomy of flowering plants (angiosperms) that reflects new knowledge about plant relationships discovered through phylogenetic studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eudicots</span> Clade of flowering plants

The eudicots, Eudicotidae, or eudicotyledons are a clade of flowering plants mainly characterized by having two seed leaves upon germination. The term derives from Dicotyledons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosids</span> Large clade of flowering plants

The rosids are members of a large clade of flowering plants, containing about 70,000 species, more than a quarter of all angiosperms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asterids</span> Clade of eudicot angiosperms

In the APG IV system (2016) for the classification of flowering plants, the name asterids denotes a clade. Asterids is the largest group of flowering plants, with more than 80,000 species, about a third of the total flowering plant species. Well-known plants in this clade include the common daisy, forget-me-nots, nightshades, the common sunflower, petunias, yacon, morning glory, sweet potato, coffee, lavender, lilac, olive, jasmine, honeysuckle, ash tree, teak, snapdragon, sesame, psyllium, garden sage, table herbs such as mint, basil, and rosemary, and rainforest trees such as Brazil nut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peridiscaceae</span> Family of flowering plants in the order Saxifragales

Peridiscaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Saxifragales. Four genera comprise this family: Medusandra, Soyauxia, Peridiscus, and Whittonia., with a total of 12 known species. It has a disjunct distribution, with Peridiscus occurring in Venezuela and northern Brazil, Whittonia in Guyana, Medusandra in Cameroon, and Soyauxia in tropical West Africa. Whittonia is possibly extinct, being known from only one specimen collected below Kaieteur Falls in Guyana. In 2006, archeologists attempted to rediscover it, however, it proved unsuccessful.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basal angiosperms</span> Descendants of most extant flowering plants

The basal angiosperms are the flowering plants which diverged from the lineage leading to most flowering plants. In particular, the most basal angiosperms were called the ANITA grade, which is made up of Amborella, Nymphaeales and Austrobaileyales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mesangiospermae</span> One of two clades of flowering plants

Mesangiospermae is a clade of flowering plants (angiosperms), informally called "mesangiosperms". They are one of two main groups of angiosperms. It is a name created under the rules of the PhyloCode system of phylogenetic nomenclature. There are about 350,000 species of mesangiosperms. The mesangiosperms contain about 99.95% of the flowering plants, assuming that there are about 175 species not in this group and about 350,000 that are. While such a clade with a similar circumscription exists in the APG III system, it was not given a name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spermatophyte</span> Clade of seed plants

A spermatophyte, also known as phanerogam or phaenogam, is any plant that produces seeds, hence the alternative name seed plant. Spermatophytes are a subset of the embryophytes or land plants. They include most familiar types of plants, including all flowers and most trees, but exclude some other types of plants such as ferns, mosses, algae.

Alan W. Meerow is an American botanist, born in New York City in 1952. He specializes in the taxonomy of the family Amaryllidaceae and the horticulture of palms and tropical ornamental plants. He also works on the population genetics and molecular systematics of cycads and palms.

Douglas Soltis is a Distinguished Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics, Florida Museum of Natural History and Department of Biology at the University of Florida. His research interests are in plant evolution and phylogeny, an area in which he has published extensively together with his wife Pamela Soltis and together they were the joint awardees of the 2006 Asa Gray Award. They are the principal investigators in the Soltis laboratory, where they both hold the rank of Distinguished Professor and are contributing authors of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentapetalae</span> Group of eudicots known as core eudicots

In phylogenetic nomenclature, the Pentapetalae are a large group of eudicots that were informally referred to as the "core eudicots" in some papers on angiosperm phylogenetics. They comprise an extremely large and diverse group that accounting about 65% of the species richness of the angiosperms, with wide variability in habit, morphology, chemistry, geographic distribution, and other attributes. Classical systematics, based solely on morphological information, was not able to recognize this group. In fact, the circumscription of the Pentapetalae as a clade is based on strong evidence obtained from DNA molecular analysis data.

References