American botanist, Melissa Lucklow studied for both her bachelors and masters degrees at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She studied botany as an undergraduate and later met Alfonse Delgado Salinas who pointed her in the direction of legumes as a group to study. She went on to complete her PhD in 1989 from the University of Texas in Austin and the same year she started at Cornell (Ithaca, New York) as a professor, and has remained here ever since. Lucklow has been the treasurer of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) and the secretary of the Willi Hennig Society. She has collected in a wide variety of locations in the Americas and also in Australia, Madagascar and South Africa, first making general collections before specialising on Mimosoid legumes. Publishing on topics such as the phylogenetic analysis of Mimosoideae, Madagascar, biogeography and systematic methods, she received the Gleason Award from the Botanical Society of America for her monograph on the genus Desmanthus (Leguminosae: Mimosoideae) which was published in 1993. Lucklow spent one year (2007-2008) as a senior fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and the species Pectis luckoviae D. Keil is named after her.

Sources:
Personal communication.