Dr. Mark J. Plotkin, who has been voted by Time magazine as an environmental “Hero for the Planet,” will speak at Loyola Monday about his new book about drug resistant bacteria.

Plotkin is the founder of Amazon Conservation Team, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preservation of the tropical rain forest. He also is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.

Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, a scientist who studies the relationship between plants and people, and received his education from Harvard, Yale and Tufts universities.

He is known to be an enthusiastic speaker and a great story teller.

During a previous speaking engagement at Loyola, he drew a standing-room-only crowd to the auditorium, said Bob Thomas, environmental communications chair.

Plotkin wrote “Medicine Quest,” a book in which he argues for the search of new medicines from the natural world.

He continues this argument in the work he co-authored with Michael Shnayerson, “The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug Resistant Bacteria,” in which he once again raises an alarming question about the future of antibiotics in the fight against drug resistant bacteria.

He also wrote “Tales of A Shaman’s Apprentice” which is currently in its fourteenth printing and has been published in Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

A children’s version, “The Shaman’s Apprentice – A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest” has also been published.

In 1994, Plotkin received the San Diego Zoo Gold Medal for Conservation, one of the top awards in the environmental field.

His work has been featured in a PBS Nova documentary, in a Fox TV documentary, on the “NBC Nightly News” and “Today Show” and on “CBS’ 48 Hours”. In addition his work was featured in Life, Newsweek, Smithsonian, Elle and People magazines as well as in The New York Times and on National Public Radio.

He is president of the Amazon Conservation Team and formerly served as Research Associate in Ethnobotanical Conservation at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University,.Director of Plant Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund and is the vice president of Conservation International in Washington, D.C.

Plotkin will speak in Roussel Hall on Monday at 7 p.m.

The lecture is sponsored by the Loyola Center for Environmental Communications.