American botanist. Noel H .Holmgren is Senior Curator Emeritus at the New York Botanical Garden. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 1968, the same year he joined the New York Botanical Garden as a research associate. Prior to this appointment, he was an assistant professor at Oregon State University. He advanced to associate curator in 1969, then to curator in 1974 and, finally, to senior curator in 1984. Concurrently with his research and curatorial duties, he taught at Lehman College, City University of New York, and for 14 years served as editor-in chief of the journal Brittonia. His specialties are the taxonomy of the Scrophulariaceae and the floristics of Western North America. Since 1969 his primary research has been directed towards the Intermountain Flora project. He contributed major parts of each of the six volumes, gaining in-depth knowledge of a wide range of families, from Apocynaceae to Violaceae. His systematic studies of the American representatives of the family Scrophulariaceae began with research on the genus Castilleja for his PhD dissertation. He has since produced accounts of the family in floras of Texas, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Intermountain region, California, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Guianas. He was also lead editor on an illustrated companion volume to Gleason and Cronquist's Manual of the Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada, which was published in 1997. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Biological Science, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Botanical Society of America, the California Botanical Society, the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, the New England Botanical Club and the Torrey Botanical Club.