Dr. Sarah Taylor will join EEB as the new herbarium collection manager in early November.

Sarah is a Connecticut native who became passionate about plants as an undergraduate. She has spent the last 15 years exploring some of North America’s diverse botanical habitats, from remote gypsum outcrops of the Chihuahuan Desert, to the awe-inspiring vistas of the alpine tundra of the Rocky Mountains, to the sandhills, blackwater swamps, and inner coastal plain of South Carolina.  At the University of Texas at Austin, she examined the evolution of edaphic endemism in Nama (Hydrophyllaceae) using morphological and molecular systematics methods to investigate what patterns we can observe to explain how approximately 20% of the species in this group became partially or totally restricted to gypsum deposits. Most recently, Sarah has been the Collections Manager at the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina (USCH), where her focus was on databasing incoming accessions and preserving the herbarium of Henry William Ravenel, a prominent South Carolina botanist active during the Civil War.

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