Dan Moerman

Moerman received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1974. His first work related to plants emerged during his dissertation research with a rural black population in coastal South Carolina in the early 1970s. Since then, he has done research primarily in two areas: medicinal plants (mostly among Native American peoples), and the impact on health of the knowledge and understanding of it that people have. In the mid 1970s, Moerman created the database Native American Ethnobotany. Started with less than 5,000 entries, it currently includes more than 44,000 items that cover the uses of plants as drugs, foods, dyes, fibers by 291 Native American groups. The database served as a source for Moerman’s book Native American Ethnobotany (1998), which received the "Annual Literature Award" of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries for 2000. In 2002, he published his book Meaning, Medicine and the "Placebo Effect", on the role and importance of meaning in the healing process. He was Editor in Chief of Economic Botany from 2004 through 2008, and he is past President of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology (2006-8).

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