Dr. Christopher S. Lobban is Emeritus Professor of Biology at University of Guam (USA). He completed his PhD studies at Dalhousie University (Canada) in 1977. Since 2007, he has been working on the benthic diatom flora of Micronesia (tropical Western Pacific), where taxonomy proved to be essential to floristics in addressing biogeography. He has published >50 papers from this project, and was awarded the Japanese Society of Diatomology's Best Paper Award 2024 for a study of Disymmetria, which considered issues of defining genera and families.