Professor Dianne Edwards CBE FRS

Dianne Edwards is a distinguished botanist renowned for her study of early plant life on Earth. Through carefully documented field work and painstaking laboratory analysis, she has helped shed light on one of the most important evolutionary events in our planet’s history — the colonisation of land by plants.

Her work on fossils discovered in Wales, Scotland and further afield has pinpointed the earliest known occurrences of biological features central to plant life. Through Dianne’s extensive contributions to the subject, we now understand plants in the Palaeozoic era to be far more complex and diverse than was previously imagined.

Dianne is a Founder Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and since 2001 has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Awarded the CBE for Services to Botany in 1999, she has more recently served as the President of the Linnean Society in London.

Subject groups

  • Patterns in Populations

    Evolution, Plant sciences / botany, Ecology (incl behavioural ecology)

  • Earth and Environmental Sciences

    Geology

Professor Dianne Edwards CBE FRS
Elected 1996
Committees Participated Role
Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Sr. R'search F'ship Panel January 2020 - December 2025 Member
Research Professorships Panel September 2019 - June 2023 Member
Research System Community of Interest November 2018 - December 2024 Member
APEX Award Committee January 2017 - December 2022 Member
Sectional Committee 9: Patterns in populations December 2015 - November 2018 Member
Grants Committee July 2015 - December 2017 Member
International Exchanges Committee January 2013 - December 2018 Member
Hooke Committee January 2013 - December 2018 Ex-Officio
Research Appointment Panel A(i) January 2012 - December 2014 Member
Nominations Committee June 2011 - December 2016 Member
Summer Science Exhibition Committee September 2010 - August 2013 Member
Hooke Committee January 2009 - December 2011 Member
Sectional Committee 5: Earth & environmental sciences December 2008 - November 2012 Chair
Council December 2005 - November 2007 Member
Sectional Committee 5: Earth & environmental sciences December 2004 - November 2005 Member
Education Committee January 2002 - July 2002 Member
Summer Science Exhibition Committee January 1997 - December 2000 Member
Sectional Committee 5: Earth & environmental sciences November 1996 - November 1999 Member