Michael J Balick Author & Editor

Lewis S. Nelson, MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Division of Medical Toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, NJ. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Emergency Medicine and a Past-President of the American College of Medical Toxicology. In addition to his clinical work in the Emergency Department at University Hospital in Newark, he is a senior consultant to the New Jersey Poison Information & Education System on human poisoning. He is the senior editor of Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies, currently in its 11^th edition. The focus of his research in on the adverse consequences of opioids used either for pain relief or for abuse, with an emphasis on system development for prevention and treatment.

Michael J. Balick, Ph.D. is Vice President for Botanical Science, Director of the Institute of Economic Botany and Senior Philecology Curator at The New York Botanical Garden. For more than four decades, he has studied the relationship between plants, people and culture, the field known as ethnobotany, and floristics, the study of botanical diversity within a specific region. His research has included studies in the Amazon Valley, Central and South America, The Middle East, Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands in Micronesia and Melanesia. He currently holds adjunct teaching or research appointments at City University of New York, Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, the Institute of Ethnomedicine and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Botanical Council and Past-President of the Society for Economic Botany.