Douglas Soltis is a Distinguished Professor in the Florida Museum of Natural History and Department of Biology at the University of Florida. He studies plant evolution using genomic and informatic approaches; interests include genome doubling (polyploidy), genome evolution, building the tree of life, and angiosperm diversification. Soltis has reconstructed relationships among major lineages of flowering plants. With others, he proposed a new classification for angiosperms (APG system). Soltis is part of a group that built the first-draft tree of life for all 2.3 million named species on Earth. He has over 500 publications, including papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Science and Nature; and 9 books. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.