Kristine Hildebrandt

Kristine Hildebrandt earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California Santa Barbara and is now a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She studies Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, and is interested in ways of documenting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in these languages.

Charlie Miksicek

Charlie is a retired archaeobotanist who worked mostly in the Southwestern US, California, and Mesoamerica. He has a long association with the Missouri Botanical Garden. He was present the first night the Climatron was opened to the public. He was a product of the Saturday Morning Kids’s Classes with Ken Peck in the middle 1960’s. His first, regular, paid job was in the Orchid Growing Range. He was lucky enough to work with Hugh Cutler from 1972 until Hugh retired in 1977. Since the summer of 2022 he was been working with the Cutler - Anderson Corn Collection; photographing the ears and entering the data in Tropicos. Besides corn, his research interests include agaves, little barley, plant domestication, the origins of agriculture, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction.