Ihsan Ali Al-Shehbaz

Prior to his current professorial and curatorial position, Al-Shehbaz was a professor and director of an herbarium at Baghdad University, a professor and director of a herbarium at Sulaymaniyah University in Iraq, and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. In 1992, Al-Shehbaz edited all botanical entries for the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. He has worked on major projects about the Flora of North America and, with the help of the Chinese botanists, the Flora of China. In regard to the latter, Al-Shehbaz said:

In 1962, Al-Shehbaz earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Baghdad University. He pursued graduate studies in the United States, gaining a Master of Science degree from Harvard University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1973.

Ihsan Ali Al-Shehbaz, Ph.D. (born 1939 in Iraq) is an Iraqi American botanist who works as adjunct professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis and Senior Curator at Missouri Botanical Garden. Al-Shehbaz's primary area of interest is Brassicaceae and The Durango Herald called him "a world expert on taxonomy of the family". A 2008 publication of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service called him "the world's authority on species in the genus Lesquerella". The author abbreviation "Al-Shehbaz" is attached to the numerous botanical taxa he has identified.