Jun Wen (, Born December 27, 1963) is an evolutionary biologist and curator at the Smithsonian's

National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. With 4.4 ...

in the Department of Botany and has worked in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics. She researches the monography, phylogenetics, biogeography, and ethnobotany of the plant families

Araliaceae The Araliaceae are a family of flowering plants composed of about 43 genera and around 1500 species consisting of primarily woody plants and some herbaceous plants commonly called the ginseng family. The morphology of Araliaceae varies widely ...

and

Vitaceae The Vitaceae are a family of flowering plants, with 14 genera and around 910 known species, including common plants such as Vitis, grapevines (''Vitis'' spp.) and Parthenocissus quinquefolia, Virginia creeper (''Parthenocissus quinquefolia''). Th ...

. She has published over 190 scientific papers.

Life and career

Jun Wen was born on 27 December in 1963 in

Hubei, China Hubei is a province of China, province in Central China. It has the List of Chinese provincial-level divisions by GDP, seventh-largest economy among Chinese provinces, the second-largest within Central China, and the third-largest among inland ...

. in 1984 she graduated from the Central China Agricultural University (Also known as Huazhong Agricultural University) with a BS in Forestry. She attended

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

and received a PhD in Biology in 1991. She completed a postdoctoral position at the

Arnold Arboretum The Arnold Arboretum is a botanical research institution and free public park affiliated with Harvard University and located in the Jamaica Plain and Roslindale, Massachusetts, Roslindale neighborhoods of Boston. Established in 1872, it is the ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1994 and then moved to the Smithsonian for a postdoctoral fellowship. She was appointed as an assistant professor and curator of the herbarium at

Colorado State University Colorado State University (Colorado State or CSU) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. It is the flagship university of the Colorado State University Syst ...

in the Department of Biology in 1995. She became an associate curator for

The Field Museum The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educationa ...

Chicago, Illinois Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, in 2000 and remained there more 5 years. In 2005 she was hired at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as a research botanist and curator in the Department of Botany. Wen has studied the world's oldest grape fossils while investigating the evolutionary history of the modern grape family. Wen was as the treasurer of the

American Society of Plant Taxonomists The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) is a botany, botanical organization formed in 1935 to "foster, encourage, and promote education and research in the field of plant taxonomy, to include those areas and fields of study that contribut ...

and in the finance section as an officer from 2006 to 2009. She was a council member of the International Association of Plant Taxonomists, a co-Editor-in-Chief of the ''Journal of Systematics and Evolution'', and on many committees for several other societies. She was elected into the Washington Biologists' Field Club in 2009. In 2006 she was a guest professor at the

Kunming Institute of Botany Kunming Institute of Botany, or KIB (), founded in 1938, is a research institution in the field of Botany, which is located in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, China. The Institute is one of the major herbariums in China and maintains a co ...

of the

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; ) is the national academy for natural sciences and the highest consultancy for science and technology of the People's Republic of China. It is the world's largest research organization, with 106 research i ...

for a 4-year appointment. Wen and fellow botanists endorsed the Shenzhen Declaration in 2017, calling for plant sciences to contribute to sustainability efforts. Wen works to inspire interest in science in young people. She is part of the Smithsonian's internship program called Youth Engagement Through Science (YES!) where she works with interns in high school and college to have hand-on experience and instruction.

Select publications

* J Wen. 1999
Evolution of eastern Asian and eastern North American disjunct distributions in flowering plants
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 30 (1), 421–455. * J Wen, EA Zimmer. 1996
Phylogeny and biogeography of Panax L.(the ginseng genus, Araliaceae): inferences from ITS sequences of nuclear ribosomal DNA
Molecular phylogenetics and evolution 6 (2), 167–177. * S Lee, J Wen. 2001
A phylogenetic analysis of ''Prunus'' and the Amygdaloideae (Rosaceae) using ITS sequences of nuclear ribosomal DNA
American Journal of Botany 88 (1), 150–160. * C Lee, J Wen. 2004
Phylogeny of Panax using chloroplast trnC–trnD intergenic region and the utility of trnC–trnD in interspecific studies of plants
Molecular phylogenetics and evolution 31 (3), 894–903. * J Wen, GM Plunkett, AD Mitchell, SJ Wagstaff. 2001
The evolution of Araliaceae: a phylogenetic analysis based on ITS sequences of nuclear ribosomal DNA
Systematic Botany, 144–167. * J Wen. 2001
Evolution of eastern Asian–eastern North American biogeographic disjunctions: a few additional issues
International Journal of Plant Sciences 162 (S6), S117-S122. * J Wen, J Zhang, ZL Nie, Y Zhong, H Sun. 2014
Evolutionary diversifications of plants on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Frontiers in genetics 5, 4 * A Soejima, J Wen. 2006
Phylogenetic analysis of the grape family (Vitaceae) based on three chloroplast markers
American Journal of Botany 93 (2), 278–287. * QY Xiang, WH Zhang, RE Ricklefs, H Qian, ZD Chen, J Wen, JH Li. 2004
Regional differences in rates of plant speciation and molecularevolution: a comparison between eastern Asia and eastern North America
Evolution 58 (10), 2175-2184. * J Wen, SM Ickert-Bond. 2009
Evolution of the Madrean–Tethyan disjunctions and the North and South American amphitropical disjunctions in plants
Journal of Systematics and Evolution 47 (5), 331–348.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wen, Jun 20th-century Chinese botanists American women botanists Biologists from Hubei Writers from Hubei 1963 births Living people Chinese non-fiction writers 20th-century Chinese women writers 20th-century Chinese science writers 21st-century Chinese women writers 21st-century Chinese writers 21st-century Chinese botanists