Birch, Joanne L.

Joanne Birch received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 2011. She received her M.A. and B.S. from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. In her research she investigates the relationships of Southern Hemisphere and Pacific floras with a focus on the evolutionary histories of monocotyledon lineages. Her dissertation research reconstructed the evolutionary history of the flowering plant family Asteliaceae, to assess how species within the family are related and to determine how the family has achieved such a globally widespread distribution.

Joanne received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to fund her dissertation research. Her teaching skills were recognized in her receipt of the Frances Davis Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is an affiliate teaching assistant for the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Botany Primer Notes and Protocols in the Plant Sciences.

Her research experience includes curation and data-basing of herbarium collections at two institutions (University of Texas, University of Hawaii), collections management for the Hawaiian Plant DNA Library, fieldwork in Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand, and public outreach programs for the National Tropical Botanic Garden (Kauai, Hawaii) and Plant Resources Center (Austin, Texas).

Joanne Birch, Ph.D.
Botany Department
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
3190 Maile Way
Honolulu
Hawai‘i 96822
808 956-3938
jbirch@hawaii.edu
http://jlbirch.wordpress.com/