Beryl B. Simpson is a professor emerita in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.
She studies plant systematics and tropical botany, focusing on angiosperms found in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America.
During high school her interest in plants continued, and her science fair project on "The Economic Aspects of the Rose" resulted in her working for Richard Howard at the Botanical Museum at Harvard during her junior year.
She then attended Radcliffe College and in her first year she took a graduate horticulture class taught by Howard, being allowed to take it because of her science fair project.
She has also undertaken basic taxonomic research of the Asteracaeae, Krameriaceae, and Fabaceae, contributing to many Floras of North and South America.
[1] Her partner is Jack Neff, an expert on bees native to the American Southwest and South America.
She has co-authored a textbook, Plants in our World: Economic Botany[4] with Molly Conner-Ogorzaly which was first published in 1986 and has been reissued in its fourth edition in 2014.