Appointments made to the Board of Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens
Defra Ministers have reappointed Liam Dolan and Sue Hartley to the Board of Trustees for second terms of three years
Defra Ministers have reappointed Liam Dolan and Sue Hartley to the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for second terms of three years. Both appointments will run from 1 March 2019 until 28 February 2022.
RBG Kew became an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body under the National Heritage Act 1983 and is sponsored by Defra. The Board of Trustees comprises a Chairman and 11 other members.
The appointments have been made in accordance with the Governance Code on Public Appointments published by the Cabinet Office. All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.
Trustees do not receive any direct remuneration for their services, although reasonable travel and subsistence expenses can be reimbursed.
There is a requirement for appointees’ significant political activity to be made public. Neither Liam Dolan nor Sue Hartley has declared any significant political activity in the past five years.
Biographical details
Liam Dolan
Professor Liam Dolan is from the Republic of Ireland and graduated with a degree in Botany at University College Dublin. He carried out PhD research on plant developmental genetics at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He then spent three years as a post-doctoral researcher at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, before becoming an independent project leader. After 13 years running his own group in Norwich, Liam moved to the University of Oxford as the Sherardian Professor of Botany in 2009 and was Head of the Department of Plant Sciences between 2012 and 2017. Liam has received a number of awards in recognition of his contributions to science. These include the President’s Medal of the Society of Experimental Biology in 2001 and membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2009. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and awarded European Research Council Advanced Grants in 2010 and 2018. Liam’s research aims to understand how plants colonised the land over 400 million years ago using a combination of genetics and palaeontology.
Sue Hartley
Sue Hartley is Professor of Ecology at the University of York and Director of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute, a pioneering interdisciplinary research partnership generating solutions to global environmental challenges. Sue studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford before moving to the University of York for her PhD on plant defences against insect herbivores and then the University of Sussex where her research included projects on the factors maintaining the extraordinary biodiversity of tropical forests and the impact of climate change on plant resistance to herbivores. In 2009 she delivered the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, becoming only the fourth woman to do so since they began in 1825. Sue served as President of the British Ecological Society 2016-2017 and has been a Board Member of Natural England since 2018.