Special Honor for Prof. Dr. H. Walter Lack
Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany for Longtime Director at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum of Freie Universität
№ 024/2016 from Feb 02, 2016
The longtime director at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Prof. Dr. H. Walter Lack, was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Steffen Krach, the State Secretary for Research, who presented the medal, stressed that over the years Professor Lack has contributed many scientific achievements in the field of botany as well as in communicating science history. One of them is the reconstruction of the library of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, for which Lack was responsible. "Thanks to Lack's work, the botanical library is one of the more important German libraries and is a central part of Berlin's library system," Krach emphasized. It is a significant factor in the importance of Berlin as a location for research.
H. Walter Lack was born in 1949 in Vienna. He studied biology at the University of Vienna, where he earned his doctorate in 1973. Over the next two years he worked as an assistant at the University of Salzburg. In 1975 he came to the University of Munich through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He later became the curator and then chief curator of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin. In 1990 he was appointed director at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum. From 1991 to 2014, he taught and did research as an adjunct professor at the Department of Biology, Freie Universität Berlin. He also worked at the universities in Palermo (Italy), Coimbra (Portugal), Patras (Greece), and Pisa (Italy).
Professor H. Walter Lack is the recipient of numerous national and international awards including the Sibthorp Medal from the University of Oxford (2001) and the Cross of Honor for Science and Art 1st Class of the Republic of Austria (2007). In 2014 on May 23, the birthday of Carl von Linné, Professor Lack was presented with the Linnean Medal, the highest award of the Linnean Society of London, in recognition of his life's work.
H. Walter Lack is an internationally renowned expert on the history of plant taxonomy, the botanical research of Alexander von Humboldt, and botanical illustrations. Altogether he has authored more than 350 scientific and popular publications. Many of them have become standard works on the history of botany and have been translated into several different languages.