About the Plenary Speakers

Dr Adam Leaché is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, and the Curator of Genetic Resources and Curator of Herpetology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Research in his lab is focused on the evolutionary biology and systematics of amphibians and reptiles. Topics of interest include species tree inference, phylogeography, and species delimitation. Adam received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, where he worked in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology studying speciation, phylogeography, and hybridization in North American lizards. He was an NSF bioinformatics postdoc fellow at UC Davis, where he worked on statistical aspects of species tree inference and species delimitation using computer simulation and empirical data. Topics of current interest in his research group include the comparative phylogeography of West African amphibians and reptiles, hybrid zone dynamics, and comparative species delimitation. Further information is available at http://faculty.washington.edu/leache/wordpress/.

Dr Sandy Knapp is a botanist who is a specialist on the taxonomy and evolution of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, and she has spent much time in the field collecting plants, mostly in South America. She works at the Natural History Museum, London, where she arrived in 1992 to manage the international project Flora Mesoamericana - a synoptic inventory of the approximately 18,000 species of plants of southern Mexico and the isthmus of Central America. She is the author of several popular books on the history of science and botanical exploration, including the award-winning Potted Histories (2004), and more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She is actively involved in promoting the role of taxonomy and the importance of science worldwide. Sandy is a trustee of several conservation and scientific organisations, and in May 2018 took office as President of the Linnean Society of London. In 2009 she was honored by the Peter Raven Outreach Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists for her work in public engagement with science and the UK National Biodiversity Network’s John Burnett Medal for her work in biodiversity conservation; she holds honorary professorships at University College London and Stockholm University. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Nacional de Ciencias in Argentina. Her work in Solanaceae spans biodiversity from taxonomy to phylogenetics and evolution, with a focus on the wild relatives of important solanaceous crops. She is currently working on in-depth taxonomic treatments of members of the family in Australasia and South America and on phylogenetics and diversification of Solanum worldwide.

Dr Isabel Sanmartín Bastida is a senior scientist at the Royal Botanical Garden, CSIC, and an evolutionary biologist interested in the theory and methods of biogeographical inference. One of her research areas is the analysis of macroevolutionary patterns of distributions across a diverse array of organisms (plants, animals, fungi). Another is the development of new analytical tools, especially Bayesian inferential methods, to unravel those processes underlying species distributions. Her latest projects focus on the integration of phylogenomic data into such tools and the use of additional sources of evidence (fossil record, environmental models) to understand the link between climate change, geographic evolution, and extinction.