Barbara Thiers is Director Emerita and Curator at New York Botanical Garden, and Research Associate at the Denver Botanic Gardens. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, she accepted a postdoctoral position at NYBG, and stayed there for 40 years, the last twenty as Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium.   A specialist in bryophytes (mosses and related plants), Thiers conducted field studies in tropical America, Australia and Asia.  She oversaw the development of the program to digitize the Steere Herbarium specimens, for which approximately five million images and data are now available online.

Thiers is past president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.  She currently serves as Secretary for the Natural Science Collections Alliance and is a member of the steering committee of the Biodiversity Collections Network.  She was a coauthor of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Mathematics report on biological collections that published in 2020.  Her book, “Herbarium: the Quest to Preserve and Classify the World’s Plants” also published that year. In retirement she has returned to research on bryophytes, currently studying the liverworts of Colorado, and creating a reference bryophyte collection at the Denver Botanic Gardens.