Leo J. Hickey

Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics
Curator of the Division of Paleobotany at the
Yale Peabody Museum Yale University
April 26, 1940 - February 9, 2013.

Leo J. Hickey was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1940. He graduated from Villanova University in 1962, and received his Ph.D. in Geology from Princeton University in 1967. After completing his doctorate he took a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. In 1969 Hickey became a curator in the Department of Paleobiology where he made the National Cleared Leaf Collection-Hickey (NCLC-H) as part of his research on the systematic distribution of the leaf characters of the flowering plants in relation to the evolution of the group. He came to Yale University in 1982 to be Director of the Yale Peabody Museum and professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and the Department of Biology. He also served as Chair of the Department of Geology and Geophysics from 2003 to 2006.

In 2009 Leo Hickey was awarded the Raymond C. Moore Medal by the Society for Sedimentary Geology for his major insights into plant ecology and evolution, achieved by his integration of geological and biological approaches to the plant fossil record.