The Department of Plant Sciences is a department of the University of Cambridge that conducts research and teaching in plant sciences. It was established in 1904, although the university has had a professor of botany since 1724.
The Cambridge University Botanic Garden is a botanical garden located in Cambridge, England, associated with the university Department of Plant Sciences. It lies between Trumpington Road to the west, Bateman Street to the north and Hills Road to the east.
William Thomas Stearn was a British botanist. Born in Cambridge in 1911, he was largely self-educated and developed an early interest in books and natural history. His initial work experience was at a Cambridge bookshop, but he also had an occupation as an assistant in the university botany department. At the age of 29, he married Eldwyth Ruth Alford, who later became his collaborator.
Stephen Donald Hopper AC FLS FTSE is a Western Australian botanist. He graduated in Biology, specialising in conservation biology and vascular plants. Hopper has written eight books, and has over 200 publications to his name. He was Director of Kings Park in Perth for seven years, and CEO of the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority for five. He is currently Foundation Professor of Plant Conservation Biology at The University of Western Australia. He was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2006 to 2012.
Nancy Tyson Burbidge was an Australian systemic botanist, conservationist and herbarium curator.
Brian Laurence "Bill" Burtt FRSE FLS, was an English botanist and taxonomist who is noted for his contributions to the family Gesneriaceae. In a career that spanned 74 years, he worked first at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and then at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). He made numerous field trips to South Africa and Sarawak and described a total of 637 new plant species. Burtt is denoted by the author abbreviation B.L.Burtt when citing a botanical name.
John Dransfield is former head of palm research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom.
The Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University is an independently funded British research institute based at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Its aim is to elucidate the regulatory systems underlying plant growth and plant development.
Stephen Blackmore CBE FRSE Royal Society of Biology FLS is a British botanist, who was educated at St. George's School, Hong Kong and the University of Reading where he completed his PhD in 1976 on the "Palynology and Systematics of the Cichorieae". He was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1976. He then worked at the Royal Society of London’s Research Station on Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean before being appointed Lecturer in Biology and Head of the National Herbarium and Botanic Garden at the University of Malawi. In 1980, he was appointed Head of Palynology at Natural History Museum in London and from 1990 to 1999 served there as Keeper of Botany. In 1985 he organized, together with Keith Ferguson, the Linnean Society symposium "Pollen and Spores: Form and Function" and in 1990, together with Susan Barnes, "Pollen and Spores: Patterns of Diversification". He was the 15th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from 1999 until 20 December 2013, and was appointed His Majesty's Botanist in Scotland in 2010.
Catherine Rosemary Martin is a Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and project leader at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, co-ordinating research into the relationship between diet and health and how crops can be fortified to improve diets and address escalating chronic disease globally.
Christopher Nigel Page (1942–2022) was an English botanist who specialised in Ferns and Spermatophytes. He also worked on conifers, naming species of Afrocarpus, for example Afrocarpus dawei and Afrocarpus gracilior, Sundacarpus and Retrophyllum. He read botany at Durham University then gained a PhD at Newcastle University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship from 1968 to 1970 at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, working on Queensland pteridophytes, before returning to the UK to work at Oxford University for a year. In 1971 he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society and that same year he joined the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), founding the RGBE Conifer Conservation Programme, now The International Conifer Conservation Programme. In 1976-77 he visited eastern Australia to work on pteridophytes and also Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, The Philippines and New Zealand. He retired from the RBGE in 1996, moving to live in Cornwall. He joined Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter, in 2004, teaching part-time on the Environmental Science and Technology degree in CSM, and also in Biosciences until 2008. Some of his research in Cornwall involved experiments in regreening former extractive minerals sites, which he presented in 2017 in Parliament, with Professor Hylke Glass, also of CSM, as co-author. He had given a talk on BBC4 in 2008 in the series "Meetings with Remarkable Trees" on monkey puzzles. He retired, as Senior Honorary Research Fellow, in June 2022. He was editor of the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 1996–2015, then President from 2016 to 2020, and received the society's Bolitho Gold Medal in 2016.
Sandra Diane Knapp is an American-born botanist. She is a merit researcher of the Plants Division of the Natural History Museum, London and from 2018 was the president of the Linnean Society of London. While working at the Natural History Museum, London she has overseen the Flora Mesoamericana inventory of Central American plants. She has published several books on botanical subjects as well as a significant number of scientific articles. In 2016 she was awarded the Linnean Medal. In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2023 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and was awarded the Engler Medal in Gold by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy.
Elinor Frances Vallentin (formerly Nichol; was a British botanist and botanical illustrator who made scientifically significant collections of botany specimens in the Falkland Islands. She co-authored the book Illustrations of the flowering plants and ferns of the Falkland Islands in 1921 with Enid Mary Cotton, a fellow botanist. This work was regarded as being particularly valuable because of Vallentin's botanical illustrations. The standard author abbreviation Vallentin is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Douglas Mackay Henderson CBE FRSE FLS was a Scottish botanist, the 12th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from 1970 to 1987.
Edward Martyn Rix is a British botanist, collector, horticulturist and author. Following completion of a PhD on Fritillaria at Cambridge University, he worked in Zürich, Switzerland and at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. He is the author of many books and articles on plants and horticulture and is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London.
Vera Higgins (1892-1968) was a British botanist, author, translator and botanical illustrator known for being an authority on succulents and cacti, particularly Crassulaceae. She graduated from Cambridge University and worked at the National Physical Laboratory. Higgins was the first editor of The Cactus Journal of the Cactus & Succulent Society of Great Britain, beginning in 1931 and continuing until 1939 when the Society closed because of World War II. She then edited the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society between 1939 - 1945. She was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1945 and was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society Victoria Medal of Honour in 1946.
Anjali Goswami is a Resesarch Leader and Dean of the Graduate Centre at the Natural History Museum. She is an Honorary Professor of Paleobiology at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment. She was elected President of the Linnean Society of London, in 2022 and is the first person of colour elected to this role since its founding in 1788. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024. Goswami's expertise is in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly using high-resolution 3D images of specimens to quantify and reconstruct the evolution of biodiversity and understand how development, ecology and large-scale environmental effects have shaped animal evolution through deep time.
Rebecca Yahr is an American lichenologist who works at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in Scotland. She was President of the British Lichen Society from 2019 until 2021.
Christopher Aidan Gilligan CBE, Sc.D. is Director of Research, Professor of Mathematical Biology and is Head of the Epidemiology and Modelling Group in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was Head of the School of Biological Sciences at Cambridge from 2009 until 2013 and is a Fellow of King's College. He is currently a Trustee of the James Hutton Institute and is the King's Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
