Tristram G. Seidler , Ph.D.

Mr. Seidler was trained in plant ecology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and obtained his PhD at Harvard University, where he studied the spatial distribution of tropical trees in the ultra-diverse rainforest of Malaysia. He continued with a post-doc at Imperial College of London’s Centre for Population Biology, where he studied invasive plants in the herbaceous community of Argentina’s flooding pampas. After returning to the US, he took a job with Native Plant Trust, a not-for-profit organization that monitors rare plants in New England, among other activities. While there, he ran the Royal Kew Garden’s Millennium Seed Bank’s Northeast US seed banking program, and built a seed bank for the seeds of rare and endangered plants for Native Plant Trust. In 2013 he took a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is Curator of the University of Massachusetts Herbarium, a medium-sized herbarium of 250,000 specimens, and teaches courses in botany and ecology.