Robert Lücking

Adjunct Curator & Research Collections Manager

The Field Museum

Chicago, Illinois  60605

USA

rlucking@fieldmuseum.org

Robert Lücking was born in Ulm, Germany, on 24 October 1964. He received his doctoral degree in 1994, with the thesis Foliicolous lichens and their microhabitat preferences in a tropical rainforest in Costa Rica', which received the Mason Hale Award of the International Association for Lichenology in 1996. From 1995 to 1997, he worked as a postdoc at the University of Ulm and in 1998, he spent three months at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, where he taught courses in lichenology and biostatistics. From 1998 to 2001, he obtained his habilitation at the Department for Plant Systematics of the University of Bayreuth. In August 2001, he was appointed Adjunct Curator (Lichenology) at the Field Museum in Chicago, and in March 2003, he assumed the position of Research Collections Manager (Mycology) at the same institution. Robert focuses on various aspects of mostly tropical lichens, including taxonomy and systematics, phylogeny and evolution, floristics and biogeography, ecology, biodiversity, bioindication, and lichen-invertebrate interactions. He has field experience in most of the Americas (where mean temperatures are above the freezing point!) and in parts of Southeast Asia, and recently initiated a workshop program to train the next generation of Latin American lichenologists. Robert has published about 250 scientific papers.