Robbert Gradstein was born in The Netherlands in 1943. He attended the University of Utrecht where he obtained a Ph.D. in botany in 1975 on his dissertation “A taxonomic monograph of the genus Acrolejeunea (Hepaticae)”. He has been on the teaching staff in the Botany Department of
the University of Utrecht since 1969 and has been a Curator of the Herbarium of that university since 1976. Furthermore, he has held positions as a graduate research assistant at the University of Cincinnati, U.S.A. during 1970–1971, a Fullbright Fellow at the University of Colorado in 1976, a JSPS fellow at the National Science Museum, Tokyo in 1979, and a Professor in Tropical Botany at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, during 1986–1987. In addition, he
has been a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama and an advisory professor of East China Normal University, Shanghai. In 1995 he became a Full Professor of Botany and Director of the Herbarium and Botanical Garden of the University of Göttingen, Germany, positions held until his retirement in 2009. Since 2010 he works as an honorary research associate at the Natural History Museum of Paris and since 2021 at Meise Botanic Garden (Belgium).
Robbert Gradstein’s research interests include the systematics of bryophytes, especially liverworts, and tropical plant diversity and ecology including impact of deforestation and land use change. He had done research in tropical America, Africa and Southeast Asia, has directed 32 dissertations and numerous projects, and has published about 500 research papers and 20 books. He is author of the “Guide to the Bryophytes of Tropical America” (2001) together with
Steven P. Churchill (Missouri Bot. Garden) and Noris Salazar Allen (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), the “Catalogue of the Plants and Lichens of Colombia” (2016) together with Rodrigo Bernal and Marcela Celis (Universidad Nacional de Colombia). His handbook “The Liverworts and Hornworts of Colombia and Ecuador”, a synthesis of 50 years of work, appeared in 2021.
Robbert Gradstein is former President of the International Association of Bryologists. He is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen and the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, and a founding member and He has been Deputy-Director of the Organization for Flora Neotropica (UNESCO) during twenty years and an editor of TAXON, Regnum Vegetabile, Flora Neotropica and Bryophytorum Bibliotheca. He has been awarded the Jesse M. Greenman Award of the Missouri Botanical Garden for best dissertation in systematics, the Prix Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle of the Societé de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève for monographic botanical research, the first Fundraising Prize of the University of Göttingen, and the Hedwig Medal of the International Association of Bryologists for lifelong achievement in bryology.
