Richard Sumner Cowan

Richard Sumner Cowan was an Australian botanist.

Biography

Early life

Cowan was born on January 23, 1921, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He was educated in Florida. He returned to his birthplace in 1938, and married Mary Frances Minnick in June 1941. In 1942 he got an AB degree from Wabash College. he joined the Navy in 1943 and was deployed to the Pacific. While serving there, he collected plants on Tinian islands, despite the fear of being shot. He got his master's degree in Hawaii in 1948, and then got a job at New York Botanical Garden. He joined two expedition to Venezuela in search of tepuis. The first trip was 5 months long, that began on October 1950. He completed his PhD in 1952 at Columbia University,^[1] after which he continued to work at the Botanical Garden. Cowan went back to South America to gather some species in Amapa, Brazil, and French Guiana.^[2]

Career

In May 1957, became an associate curator for the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution, where he continued his work in South America. In 1961 he was elected to the Washington Biologists’ Field Club, and in the same year got a membership to the flora and fauna committee.^[2] He got several unexpected promotions while working for the Smithsonian: first, he became an assistant director for the National Museum of Natural History in 1962, then in mid 1965 he became deputy director of the Museum, and in late 1965 became director, a position which he kept till 1972.^[3]

He received a New York Botanical Garden Distinguished Service Award in 1968, and the same year was awarded with the Henry Allen Gleason Award from the New York Botanical Garden. The same year, he got another honor, a Smithsonian Institution Special Achievement Award for his Swartzia revision. Despite his administrative skills, he was still a secretary-general for International Botanical Congress in Seattle in 1969. In 1972 he became an organzer for International Congress of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology. He was appointed as a senior botanist in the Department of Botany in the same year. He was also recognized with a medal in 1979 for Taxonomic Literature, that he did for National Agricultural Library.^[2]

Retirement, marriage and death

He retired on October 31, 1985, and headed for Australia in December of the same year. In 1986 he moved to Perth where he started to study Australian Acacia and other Australian mimosoids. On August 23, 1986 he married Roberta Ann Tobias, and had a son named Michael Norman Sumner Cowan. In 1988 he was awarded Commemorative Scroll Award from the Australian Systematic Botany Society for his work on Taxonomic Literature there. He received a medal in 1990 for the History and Bibliography of Natural History from Founder’s Medal of the Society. He suffered a stroke in 1997, from which he recovered, but the head trauma from the fall killed him on November 17 of the same year.^[2]

References