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.