BotanyBetsabé Castro Escobar
2019 The Garden Club of America Fellowship in Tropical Botany

Betsabé Castro Escobar is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Integrative Biology Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the interactions of humans with culturally signi cant plants in the Caribbean, working currently with a group of plants called the calabash trees in the Tropical Americas. Escobar researches through the lens of ethnobotany, ecology, and evolution, tracing responses of plant- human interface including dispersal, domestication, and documenting the versatility of uses. She is passionate about preserving traditional plant knowledge and is fascinated with how humans have stimulated evolutionary responses in plants. She is an NSF Graduate Fellow, a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Diversity Fellow, and Botany in Action Fellow.
The Garden Club of America Fellowship in Tropical Botany
To promote the preservation of tropical forests by enlarging the body of botanists with field experience.
Learn more See all recipients