Daniel L. Nickrent

Nickrent has over 26000 citations (as of 25 April 2026) according to Google Scholar. In 1977 he received a bachelor's degree in Botany from Southern Illinois University. He earned a master's degree from Old Dominion University with work on the parasite witchweed Striga, and earned a PhD from Miami University in 1984 ("A systematic and evolutionary study of selected taxa in the genus Arceuthobium (Viscaceae)").

From 1990 to 1994, Nickrent was assistant professor in the faculty of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. and the publication of one of the earliest species-level molecular phylogenies using nuclear ITS on the dwarf mistletoes, Arceuthobium.

From 1994 to 2003, as an associate professor in the Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale,

From 2003 to 2014, Nickrent was a full professor at the university, becoming an emeritus professor (SIUC) from 2014 onwards. the start of a continuing collaboration with Julie Barcelona and Pieter Pelser. His work in the Philippines, funded by NSF-DEB in 2018, is a collaborative project with Botanical Research Institute of Texas and other national and international institutions. Other grants have also been awarded to Nickrent as principal investigator to allow continuing work on other aspects of Santalales and parasitic plants.

Since 1986, Nickrent has served as an associate professional scientist with the Illinois Natural History Survey.

He has been an adjunct professor at Cornell since 2021, and has served as a research associate for the Fort Worth Botanical Garden since 2020, and as research associate for the Missouri Botanical Garden from 2011 to 2025.

The Angiosperm Phylogeny Website (Santalales) notes that in 2008, Der & Nickrent found Santalaceae to be polyphyletic with some genera being outside the family, but eight well supported clades within. While in 2019, Nickrent and others further improved resolution within the family, using nuclear and chloroplast genes, while trying to understand its complex morphology.

in 2023, with Nickrent's advent to Cornell, the Cornell Herbarium site CUBIC (Cornell University Botanical Image Collection), a cooperative database of plant images, was created by combining the sites Plantsystematics.org, and Phytoimages.

Honors Eponymous species Amyema nickrentii Barcelona & Pelser – 2013, Phytotaxa 125(1) 47.