American biologist, born in Chicago, Illinois, on 9 October 1939, Philip Arthur Silverstone-Sopkin is a professor at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and director of their herbarium CUVC. He began his career in biology as a herpetologist, and later changed to botany. When asked why he changed to botany, he replied "I saw the light." He is interested in the flora of Colombia (especially the genus Eucharis, Amaryllidaceae) and has undertaken numerous expeditions in Colombia and other regions of the world, resulting in some impressive discoveries. Trained in Florida at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, he gained two undergraduate degrees, the first in economics and Spanish (1961) and the second in zoology and botany (1965). Moving to Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, he became assistant curator of their herpetological collections and a research assistant at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, as well as a teaching assistant, while working toward his PhD in biology, which he received in 1971. For several years after this he worked as an instructor, first at Cerritos College in Norwalk and later at California State University at Los Angeles, before moving to Colombia in 1981.
Based in Cali, Silverstone-Sopkin has worked as a teacher and researcher at the Universidad del Valle as well as an instructor at the Colegio Bolívar. Even before the move, he had undertaken several considerable expeditions to Colombia, Brazil, and French Guiana, and has continued to explore the natural history of his adopted country on fieldtrips ever since. As well as studying the Colombian flora, he has been involved with much herpetological research; between 1966 and 1988, his trips culminated in the discovery of two new species of salamanders, nine new frog species and a new frog genus. He has also described 11 new species of dendrobatid frogs and in 1971 was involved in the first herpetological expedition to the summit of the Alto del Buey in the Chocó, where he found a new species of frog, Dendrobates altobueyensis Silverstone, sitting on the summit marker. In the same department in 1982, 1984, and 1988, he carried out three botanical expeditions to the Cerro del Torrá. In 1979, at Isla Gorgona, he collected the first record for Colombia of a petrel, Oceanodroma hornbyi G.R.Grey (Aves: Hydrobatidae).
As a botanist Silverstone-Sopkin has collected over 30 new species of plants, including the Malvaceae species Gaya mutisiana Krapov., collected at the Universidad del Valle, and Eucharis caucana Meerow, a species of Amaryllidaceae endemic to the Cauca Valley. He collected the first Alzateaceae record for Colombia and rediscovered a species the IUCN had deemed extinct, Plagiolirion horsmannii Baker (Amaryllidaceae), which had not been collected for 94 years. Silverstone-Sopkin directs the CUVC herbarium 'Luis Sigifredo Espinal-Tascon' and, after 15 years of hard work, he finally persuaded the university to undertake a considerable extension to its collection space. Construction of a new building, in which space for the collections will be three times its current capacity, began in November 2009 and should be completed in the summer of 2010.
His numerous publications cover frog taxonomy and ecology, floristics of the Cerro del Torrá and the Cauca Valley, and new species for several plant families, as well as a couple of papers on ornithological topics. Silverstone-Sopkin has also collected further afield, in Kyrgyzstan and China, and some 13 species of plants and three species of amphibians bear his name, as does the frog genus Silverstonea Grant.
Sources:
Personal communication, December 2009.
