Paul Alan Cox /

Paul Alan Cox is an ethnobotanist whose scientific research focuses on discovering new medicines by studying patterns of wellness and illness among indigenous peoples.Cox was born in Salt Lake City in 1953. After receiving his B.S. in Botany and Philosophy from Brigham Young University, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to read for his M.Sc. in Ecology at the University of Wales at Bangor. He received a Danforth Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for his Ph.D. studies at Harvard University in Biology where he was twice awarded the Bowdoin Prize. He subsequently was awarded a Miller Research Fellowship at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley and later became a University of Melbourne Research Fellow in Australia.Although trained in evolutionary ecology, because of his fluency in Polynesian languages, Cox was encouraged by Harvard Professor Richard Evans Schultes to pursue ethnobotanical studies. He became increasingly focused on ethnomedicine after his mother died from breast cancer; he subsequently discovered with his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute the anti-HIV/AIDS properties of prostratin. He was elected as President of the Society for Economic Botany and President of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology. After serving as professor and dean at Brigham Young University he became the first King Carl XVI Gustaf Professor of Environmental Science at the Swedish Agricultural University and the Uppsala University, a visiting professorship established by the Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agricultural and Forestry and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.