Paul Alan Cox is an American 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. Education 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, twice, he was awarded the Bowdoin Prize, a distinction he shares with Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was appointed as a Miller Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley and as a University of Melbourne Research Fellow in Australia. Early in his academic career he was named a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator by Ronald Reagan, and used the research funds to pursue his interests in mathematical biology and ethnobotany. Career 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 Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. For seven years he was director of the Congressionally-chartered National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) in Hawaii and Florida. Currently, he is executive director of the Brain Chemistry Labs, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He is the author of over 220 scientific papers, reviews, and books and was chosen by Time magazine as one of eleven "Heroes of Medicine" in 1997 for his search for new medicines from plants. Evolutionary ecology Cox began his research in evolutionary ecology as a student of John L. Harper at the University of Wales in Bangor by studying dioecy in plants. At Harvard University where he served for four years as Teaching Fellow for E. O. Wilson, he studied how vertebrate pollination influenced breeding system evolution in tropical lianas. Collaborating at Harvard with tropical botanist P. B. Tomlinson, at Berkeley with Herbert G. Baker, and Melbourne with Bruce Knox, he used mathematical search theory to analyze seagrass pollination and later, with mathematician James Sethian used search theory to develop a new approach to the evolution of different size sperm and eggs, known as anisogamy, a topic he continued to pursue with Japanese biologist Tatsuya Togashi.