Speaker

Professor Kathy Willis is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Biology and Principal of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford, and a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. Her previous roles include Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and membership of the UK Government’s Natural Capital Committee.

Her research spans three main areas: how plant biodiversity responds to climate change and environmental drivers over timescales from decades to millennia; the flow and spatial distribution of critical ecosystem services such as carbon capture, flood protection, clean water and soil preservation; and the relationship between biodiversity and human health. This includes research into both harmful impacts, such as mosquito-borne disease, and the growing evidence for the positive physical and mental health benefits of interacting with nature and environmental microbiomes.

In addition to her research, she has led major global initiatives on plant and fungal biodiversity, including State of the World’s Plants, State of the World’s Fungi, and was a lead author of the 2019 Global Assessment of Biodiversity for the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Professor Willis is an award-winning science communicator. She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series From Roots to Riches and has appeared on numerous BBC programmes, including Sir David Attenborough’s Extinction: The Facts, Feeding the World, The Life Scientific, Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World, and The Evidence. She was awarded the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Medal for public communication of science in 2015.

She has published around 200 academic papers, three books and two edited volumes, including The Evolution of Plants, Biodiversity in the Green Economy, Roots to Riches, Botanicum, and most recently Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health.