Dr. Kanchi Gandhi | |
|---|---|
| Kancheepuram Natarajan Gandhi | |
 Gandhi in 2015 | |
| Born | January 28, 1948 India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Other names | Kanchi Gandhi, Kanchi N. Gandhi |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Education | University of Louisiana at Monroe |
| Alma mater | Texas A&M University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | phytochemistry, botany |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Author abbrev. (botany) | Gandhi |
Kancheepuram (Kanchi) Natarajan Gandhi (born January 28, 1948, in India)[1] is Senior Nomenclature Registrar and Bibliographer at Harvard University in the Department of Botany in the Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries (HUH and HUL). He manages a botanical classification project to identify and classify all plants in the Western world (the New World) through his role at Harvard,[2] where Harvard's newly adopted “open-access digitization policy”[3] assigns to the public domain most of the images of plants he and others have classified and preserved.
He is famous for his long-held role as part of the collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium in developing the International Plant Names Index, a database of the names and associated bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns, and lycophytes.
Before his recruitment by Harvard University in the 1990s, he was a research associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Jan 1990 – Jul 1995), Before that, he taught botany at Calicut University in Kerala, South India.[4]
Gandhi frequently travels to India to lecture on vascular plant systematics, plant nomenclature, plant morphology, plant geography, and plant taxonomy, especially Asteraceae and Poaceae, as he did in 2012, 2013,[5] 2014[6][7] and 2017, for reunions with his former students in India, who are or are not doing botany, and to transfer his expertise to botanists in India.
His current projects include:
Gandhi is married, living west of Boston, and his daughter is a medical student. He is a lifelong vegetarian and a member of the Boston Vegetarian Society.[citation needed]
