As part of a five year collaboration with Toyota and IUCN, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has created a Plant Assessment Unit (PAU), where dedicated staff provide a focal point for Kew’s scientists working on conservation assessments. Addressing the need to accelerate the assessment of species in tropical regions, the team support the preparation and publication of extinction risk assessments on the Red List. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to our assessment work, focussing particularly on groups such as Myrcia, a Neotropical genus of trees and shrubs which forms an important component of the diversity in some of Brazil's most threatened habitats, Cola, an African tree genus which includes the source of the 'secret' ingredient in popular soft drinks, and endemic orchid