Austin R. Mast is a research botanist. Born in 1972, he obtained a Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

 in 2000. He is currently an associate professor within the Department of Biological Science at Florida State University

Florida State University

The Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...

 (FSU), and has been director of FSU's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium since August 2003.

One of his main areas of research is the phylogenetics

Phylogenetics

In biology, phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups of organisms , which is discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices...

 of Grevilleoideae

Grevilleoideae

Grevilleoideae is a subfamily of the Proteaceae family of flowering plants. Mainly restricted to the southern hemisphere, it contains around 44 genera and about 950 species. Genera include Banksia, Grevillea and Macadamia.-Description:...

, a subfamily of Proteaceae

Proteaceae

Proteaceae is a family of flowering plants distributed in the Southern Hemisphere. The family comprises about 80 genera with about 1600 species. Together with the Platanaceae and Nelumbonaceae they make up the order Proteales. Well known genera include Protea, Banksia, Embothrium, Grevillea,...

. In 2005 he showed the genus Banksia

Banksia

Banksia is a genus of around 170 species in the plant family Proteaceae. These Australian wildflowers and popular garden plants are easily recognised by their characteristic flower spikes and fruiting "cones" and heads. When it comes to size, banksias range from prostrate woody shrubs to trees up...

to be paraphyletic

Paraphyly

A group of taxa is said to be paraphyletic if the group consists of all the descendants of a hypothetical closest common ancestor minus one or more monophyletic groups of descendants...

 with respect to Dryandra, Collaborating with Australian botanist Kevin Thiele

Kevin Thiele

Kevin R. Thiele is curator of the Western Australian Herbarium. His research interests include the systematics of the plant families Proteaceae, Rhamnaceae and Violaceae, and the conservation ecology of grassy woodland ecosystems...

, he subsequently transferred all Dryandra taxa to Banksia, publishing over 120 taxonomic names in the process. The change has been adopted by the Western Australian Herbarium, although has met with some controversy.

He has recently started work on the Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project, which seeks to create a repository of annotated high-resolution digital images of plant specimens within the East Gulf Coastal Plain

Gulf Coastal Plain

The Gulf Coastal Plain extends around the Gulf of Mexico in the Southern United States and eastern Mexico.The plain reaches from the western Florida Panhandle, the southwestern two thirds of Alabama, over most of Mississippi, some of western Tennessee and Kentucky, southwest Arkansas, the Florida...

, a region with a very high diversity of rare and endangered plants.