-- The Botanical Society of America awarded its 2000 Merit Award, its highest honor, to Leslie Gottlieb, a UC Davis professor in the Section of Evolution and Ecology. An announcement in Plant Science Bulletin, the society's newsletter, described Gottlieb as: "one of the most influential plant evolutionary biologists over the past several decades." Award committee chair, University of Wisconsin genetics professor John Doebley, cited three of Gottlieb's publications as classics, including a 1984 article in American Naturalist called "one of the most important papers in plant evolutionary biology during the past half century."