Biography

American botanist. William Thomas Gillis was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University (BA 1955) and Michigan State University (MSc 1957, PhD 1970). His PhD thesis, a study of the systematics and ecology of the genus Toxicodendron (Anacardiaceae), won the Jesse M. Greenman Award in 1972 for best published paper in plant systematics based on a doctoral dissertation. At the time of his death Gillis was best known for this work even though he had devoted the greater part of his scientific career to a revision of the flora of the Bahamas. This interest began in 1963 when he was conducting field research in the Bahamas for his PhD He returned several times while still a doctoral student, and botany instructor, to collect for the herbarium at Michigan State University, including a visit to one of the most remote islands, Rum Cay, which had been little studied by botanists. In 1968 he attended a six-week summer seminar in tropical botany at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami. For the course Gillis produced a research paper on some unusual genera in the Garden's collection of Bahaman flora. At the urging of one of the instructors on the course, Richard A. Howard of the Arnold Arboretum, Gillis applied for and received an appointment as a taxonomist at the Garden. In 1969 he was promoted to curator and was given an assistant professorship in the Department of Biology at the University of Miami.

In 1970, in collaboration with his mentor Richard Howard and with George Proctor of the Science Museum of Jamaica, Gillis submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to undertake a revision of The Bahama Flora published by Britton and Millspaugh in 1920. Although the NSF rejected the project in the summer of 1971, the three men carried on with the flora in the hope of eventually securing funds from the NSF or another granting agency. Gillis continued his frequent collecting trips in the Bahamas, alone and in the company of Proctor. But in April 1972 he was abruptly dismissed from Fairchild Tropical Garden, perhaps a result of a personality clash with director John Popenoe. Even with this setback Gillis and his collaborators were determined to complete the flora. Popenoe, however, claimed that the project belonged to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, because Gillis had conducted his field work under its auspices. Shortly thereafter Popenoe recruited Donovan Correll, who had been a Program Director for Systematic Biology at the NSF, the same granting body which had rejected Gillis's proposal. Correll was successful in gaining funding from NSF for essentially the same project that Gillis had had rejected. Repeated overtures by Gillis to assist were rebuffed and his publications were largely ignored by the team of the Bahama flora project.

From 1972 to 1974 Gillis worked full time on the Bahama flora as a Mercer Research Fellow at the Arnold Arboretum. His collections and investigations during this period furnished material for 13 scientific papers and for the Bibliography of the Natural History of the Bahama Islands, co-published with Roger Byrne and Wyman Harrison in 1975. One of his discoveries was an indigenous population of Roystonea on the island of Little Inagua. He also contributed a monthly column on native plants to Conch News, a weekly newspaper of the Turks and Caicos Islands. He continued his work on the Bahama flora as a visiting assistant professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and, from 1977, as assistant professor at Michigan State University at East Lansing and Kellogg Biological Station. In 1976 he served as botanist on an expedition to the Bahamas led by ornithologist Mary Clench of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who was in search of the endangered Kirtland's warbler. In January 1979 he was advised by his doctor of the need for corrective heart surgery. That summer, rather than disappoint his students, he chose to teach two scheduled summer courses at Kellogg Biological Station before his surgery, and while there suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 45. His unpublished research materials are archived in The Beal-Darlington Herbarium at Michigan State University.

Source:
L.B. Kass & W.H. Eshbaugh, 1993, "The contributions of William T. Gillis (1933-1979) to the flora of the Bahamas", Rhodora, 95 (883/884): 369-391.