American botanist. A specialist in parasitic plants, Daniel L Nickrent was born and raised in Normal, Illinois, where he attended Illinois State University. A summer job in 1975 conducting floristic research in Great Dismal Swamp, with Dr Lytton Musselman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, led him to choose botany as his major. After finishing his bachelor's degree at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 1977, he worked on the fern group Dryopteris as a graduate student at Old Dominion University. His interest in parasitic plants began in the summer of 1978 when he was employed on a USDA study of Striga in North Carolina. After graduating in 1979, and a brief period at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, he embarked on doctoral research at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, under the supervision of Dr W. Hardy Eshbaugh (Botany) and Dr Sheldon Guttman (Zoology), starting with an investigation of haustorial development in a hemiparasitic member of Orobanchaceae (Dasistoma), but later switching his research to systematic relationships in Arceuthobium (Viscaceae) using isozymes (Nickrent, 1984).

After his PhD, he was hired as an assistant professor and director of the herbarium of the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He left in 1990 to join the botany faculty of his alma mater, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he is now a full professor. Dr Nickrent is a member of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and the Botanical Society of America, among other professional societies. In his spare time, he gardens, plays guitar, creates wood sculptures, and enjoys hiking, canoeing, and camping.