Meg Lowman is Director of Environmental Initiatives at New College of Florida, with professorships in biology and environmental studies. Lowman is actively building up a new department of environmental studies, to focus on conservation outreach for students in the Florida community, create a subtropical field station for regional universities, and conduct conservation biology research in tropical ecosystems. Her expertise involves canopy ecology, particularly plant-insect relationships, and spans more than 25 years in Australia, Peru, Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific. She has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed publications and three books. Previously, Lowman served first as Director of Research and Conservation and then Chief Executive Officer of Selby Botanical Gardens, an institution that specializes in tropical plants, especially epiphytes.


Prior to joining Selby, Lowman was a professor in Biology and Environmental Studies at Williams College, Massachusetts where she pioneered temperate forest canopy research and built the first canopy walkway in North America. Working in Australia on forest ecology, she was instrumental in determining the causes of the eucalypt dieback syndrome that destroyed millions of trees in rural Australia, assisted with conservation programs for tree regeneration, and ran a successful ecotourism business in the outback. For twenty years, she studied studying mechanisms of tropical diversity in Australian rain forests with Joseph Connell (University of California, Santa Barbara).