Abstract
Johannes van Staden was born in Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo in 1939 and grew up in various parts of South Africa. He received BSc and MSc degrees in Botany from the University of Stellenbosch, where he also lectured. He then relocated to the University of Natal, where he received a PhD in Botany in 1970. He worked his way up the academic ladder and was promoted to Professor of Botany and appointed Head of Department in 1987. In 1999 he became Director of his own postgraduate research center (Research Centre for Plant Growth and Development). Prof van Staden has been a Research Fellow at the University College of Wales, University of California, Davis, National Australian University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Broom’s Barn Experimental Station in the UK, and the University of West-Hungary (where he was awarded an Honorary DSc).
In his career he has worked in many areas of Plant Sciences/Botany, but specifically in the fields of plant hormones, seed germination, senescence, stress physiology, post-harvest physiology, biotechnology and plant tissue culture, ethnobotany, secondary products, and ethnomedicine. He has authored/co-authored over 1380 publications, including more than 15 publications in Natural Product Communications. In 2013, he won the “Gerald Blunden Award” for his review article “Cytotoxic Agents of the Corinne Series of Amaryllidaceous Alkaloids”, Natural Product Communications,
In 2002 he fell within the top 0.5% of internationally most cited authors. He has a number of publications that qualify as “citation classics” (over 100 citations). Prof van Staden has supervised 89 MSc and 105 PhD students, and 74 Postdoctoral Fellows, many of whom are now working in research laboratories all over the world. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Botany; the Associate Editor of Acta Physiologiae Plantarum; and on the editorial board of a number of other journals, including Natural Product Communications.
It is a great pleasure to honor the outstanding achievements of Professor van Staden on the occasion of his 80th birthday and to send him warm wishes from all his colleagues and friends. My thanks go to the authors and reviewers who have made this special collection of Natural Product Communications possible and to our production department for their efforts.
We all express our appreciation for his excellent contributions to natural products research and education worldwide and wish him all the best for his future.