Kanchi Gandhi


Kancheepuram Natarajan Gandhi is Senior Nomenclature Registrar and Bibliographer at Harvard University in the Department of Botany in the Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries. He manages a botanical classification project to identify and classify all plants in the Western world through his role at Harvard, where Harvard's newly adopted “open-access digitization policy” assigns to the public domain most of the images of plants he and others have classified and preserved.
He is famous for his long-held role as part of the collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium in developing the International Plant Names Index, a database of the names and associated bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns, and lycophytes.
Before his recruitment by Harvard University in the 1990s, he was a Research Associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Before that, he taught botany at Calicut University in Kerala, South India.
Gandhi frequently travels to India to lecture on vascular plant systematics, plant nomenclature, plant morphology, plant geography, and plant taxonomy, especially Asteraceae and Poaceae, as he did in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2017, for reunions with his former students in India, who are or are not doing botany, and to transfer his expertise to botanists in India.
His current projects include:
Gandhi is married, living west of Boston, and his daughter is a medical student. He is a lifelong vegetarian and a member of the Boston Vegetarian Society.