Ottoline Leyser

Ottoline is a Professor of Plant Development and received her BA (1986) and PhD (1990) in Genetics from the University of Cambridge. After post-doctoral research at Indiana University and Cambridge, in she built an independent research programme at the University of York, where she worked from 1994-2010. She is currently Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where she has worked since 2011. Among her honours are the Society of Experimental Biology’s President’s Medal (2000), the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award (2007), the International Plant Growth Substance Association’s Silver Medal (2010). She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours list for services to plant science, science in society and equality and diversity in science. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and currently chairs its Science Policy Advisory Group. She is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and a Fellow of Clare College. She served for 6 years on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Her research is aimed at understanding the role of plant hormones in plant developmental plasticity, using the regulation of shoot branching as a model.