Baroness Kathy Willis of Summertown CBE, FGS, FRSB, FLS

(Plant Sciences, m.1986)

Highly decorated academic and peer, internationally recognised for her work, on plant (and fungal) biodiversity change.

Kathy Harris

Baroness Kathy Willis of Summertown CBE, FGS, FRSB, FLS is a Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Biology and the Principal of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She is also a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords.

Kathy came to Corpus to complete a PhD in Plant Sciences, having done her undergraduate degree in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton. From Corpus she took on a postdoctoral research fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge, a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Plant Sciences, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) in the Godwin Institute for Quaternary Research.

Kathy made the move to the “other place” in 1999, where she held the Tasso Leventis Chair in Biodiversity at the department of Zoology and was Head of the Oxford Long-term Ecology Laboratory, along with holding a Professorial Fellowship at Merton College.

In 2013, Kathy was named Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew on a five-year secondment from Oxford. In 2018 she returned to Oxford as Principal of St Edmund Hall and was appointed CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to biodiversity and conservation.

Kathy is internationally recognised for her work and led a number of initiatives to assimilate global knowledge on plant (and fungal) biodiversity change while in her role at Kew, including State of the World’s Plants (2016, 2017), State of the World’s Fungi (2018) and more recently as a lead author on the 2019 Global Assessment of Biodiversity for the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Kathy’s published academic papers stretch into the hundreds, and she regularly appears in the media, presenting, being interviewed and giving expert opinion on current affairs affecting our living environment. In recognition of this work, Kathy was awarded the Michael Faraday Medal for public communication of science from the Royal Society in 2015. She is also a published author with her latest book, Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature improves Our Health (Bloomsbury) just published.