German-born botanist living and collecting in Bolivia since 1978. Beck is Director of the Bolivian National Herbarium, which he founded in 1979.

Stephan Beck studied agricultural sciences and botany at Göttingen University and at ENSA in Montpellier, France, gaining his doctorate from Göttingen in 1982. In 1976-1977 he studied the ecological impact of agricultural and forest projects in Peru and Bolivia for the German Ministry of Cooperation (BMZ) alongside Heinz Ellenberg. Following on from this work, Beck helped to establish the Ecology Institute in La Paz, Bolivia, a partnership between the Universidad de San Andrés in La Paz and Göttingen University. He worked at the Institute as a plant ecologist from 1978 to 1982, meanwhile founding the Bolivian National Herbarium in La Paz in 1979, of which he was director until 1989 and again from 1999 to the present. Overlapping with this role, Beck lectured and carried out research at the Ecology Institute (1983-1996) and was appointed Professor of Botany and Ecology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz, in 1983.

In his work Beck has made floristic studies of Bolivia and the Andes and made many contributions in the area of biodiversity conservation. He is active in initiatives to conserve wild relatives of crops and in sustainable land use projects and is a co-editor of the Catalogo de las Plantas vasculares de Bolivia organised by Missouri Botanical Garden. Beck usually publishes in Spanish. His interests range across all flowering plants, though especially Asteraceae, Cyperaceae, Lentibulariaceae, Mayacaceae, Melastomaceae, Passifloraceae and Poaceae. He has collected more than 30,000 specimens in Bolivia.

Sources:
Personal communication, October 2011.