Professor Mark Chase FRS

Mark Chase is a botanist renowned for his work on plant evolution, which is informed by studies of plant DNA. In particular, he has developed and analysed large datasets of plant DNA sequences. His findings have led to an improved understanding of the chemicals that plants produce, the process of plant development and the composition of plant DNA.

Much of Mark’s research has been conducted on orchids and the tobacco plant. He is an original member of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, an informal group of botanists that meets to discuss the genetic characterisation of plants and who developed a classification system for flowering plants. He is currently the a senior researcher in the Jodrell Laboratory at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Mark has published over 500 papers and book chapters, several considered to be highly innovative benchmark studies due to their large number of collaborators and integration of different types of information. He was awarded the Linnean Medal in 1999 and the Darwin–Wallace Medal in 2008, both from the Linnean Society of London.

Subject groups

  • Organismal biology, evolution and ecology

    Evolution, Taxonomy and systematics, Population genetics

Professor Mark Chase FRS
Elected 2003