Biography

American botanist. Born in New York City in 1909, Rogers McVaugh graduated with highest honours in botany from Swathmore College in 1931 and received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1935. His first faculty appointment was in the department of botany at the University of Georgia, Athens (1935-1938). Before and during the Second World War, he was a botanist in the Division of Plant Exploration and Introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture (1938-1946). The majority of his career, however, was spent at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was professor and curator of vascular plants for 33 years and ultimately held the Harley Harris Bartlett chair in botany. He served for the year 1955-1956 as program director for systematic biology at the National Science Foundation.

Since 1980 he has been a research professor of botany at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and NCU's curator of Mexican plants. In addition, he is adjunct research scientist at the Hunt Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Over the course of seven decades, he has published twelve books and over 200 articles, most notably his ongoing, multi-volume project Flora Novo-Galiciana, for which he was awarded the Botanical Society of America's Henry Allan Gleason Award in 1984. He is also the recipient of the Gold Medal of the Sociedad Botánica de Mexico in 1978, the first annual Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in 1984, the first Luz María Villarreal de Puga Medal from the University of Guadalajara in 1993, the Millennium Medal of the International Botanical Congress in 1999, the first Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany from the Smithsonian Institution in 2001, and the Centennial Award of the Botanical Society of America in 2006. Professor McVaugh has served as vice president (1969-1972) and president (1972-1975) of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy. He has collected an estimated 23,000 specimens, the vast majority of which are held at MICH.