Faculty Profiles

David Lemke is in his 42nd year of teaching at Texas State University, where he holds the rank of professor and serves as the graduate advisor for the Department of Biology. He has served as the department's associate chair for graduate programs since 2006 and as interim department chair during the 2024–2025 academic year. During his tenure at Texas State, he has taught nearly twenty different courses, ranging from freshman non-majors’ biology to graduate-level classes in plant systematics and field botany and has served as a freshman laboratory coordinator for nearly three decades. He is a recipient of the Texas State University President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and two Everette Swinney Faculty Senate Excellence in Teaching awards, as well as the Tri-Beta Biological Honor Society’s teaching excellence award. In 2022, he was one of ten faculty members throughout Texas to be named a Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation and in 2023 was recognized as a Regents' Teacher by the Texas State University System.

Dr. Lemke’s research is focused on the vegetation of Texas and has included floristic surveys, morphological, anatomical, and ecological studies of aquatic and terrestrial angiosperms, paleobotanical investigations of fossil wood anatomy, and botanical history. He is the author of approximately 50 peer-reviewed contributions, and has authored or coauthored nearly 120 presentations at meetings of various scientific societies, often with graduate or undergraduate students.

Dr. Lemke is a native of New Jersey (but made it to Texas as fast as he could, celebrating his first birthday in Houston) and received his bachelor’s degree with honors in biology from Bucknell University and a doctorate in botany from The University of Texas at Austin. After holding visiting teaching appointments at Louisiana State University and The University of Texas at El Paso, he assumed his current position at Texas State University. At Texas State he has served on numerous university, college, and departmental committees and as faculty advisor to the botany club and the wildlife society plant identification team. He has been a reviewer for a variety of botanical journals and textbook publishers, served terms as the newsletter editor for the Texas Organization for Endangered Species and an associate editor for botany for the Southwestern Naturalist, and is currently the manuscript editor for the Texas Journal of Science. Dr. Lemke has organized and run the Christmas Mountains Research Symposium, held each spring at Terlingua Ranch in the Big Bend region, each year since its establishment. He is frequently invited to lecture to public groups, such as the Native Plant Society of Texas and various central Texas Master Gardener and Master Naturalist programs. He has served several terms as chair of the botany section for the Texas Academy of Science and was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1990. At present, he also holds appointments as a Research Associate with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Ft. Worth and as a Visiting Researcher with the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin. In addition to his long association with the Texas Academy of Science, he is a member of the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the International Association of Plant Taxonomists, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, and the Southwestern Association of Naturalists.