Exploring the World of Plants: Unfinished Business

Professor Peter R. Crane, F.R.S.
Director, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew

Campus Map to the Dedman Life Sciences Building (Building 30). 

Peter R. Crane is the twelfth Director of The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - one of the largest, most prestigious and influential botanical gardens in the world. The Royal Botanic Gardens were founded in 1759 and today comprise estates at Kew, in west London, and at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. The gardens employ more than 550 scientists and other staff and the living collections include some 33,000 plant taxa. The herbarium is the largest in the world with over 7 million specimens and Kew's Millennium Seed Bank project is a massive effort in ex situ plant conservation with the aim of protecting 10% of the world's plant species - especially from arid and semi-arid lands before 2010. Professor Crane holds academic appointments in the Department of Botany at the University of Reading and the Department of Geology at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He was elected to the Royal Society - the U.K. Academy of Sciences - in 1998. In 2001 he was elected a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He took up his position at Kew in 1999.

Professor Crane received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in botany from the University of Reading, U.K. He was also on the faculty of the University of Reading from 1978 to 1981. From 1981 to 1982 he was a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Biology at Indiana University. Professor Crane joined the Field Museum in Chicago in 1982 as Assistant Curator in the Department of Geology, and from 1992 to 1999 served as Vice President and then Director with overall responsibility for the Museum's scientific programs that included more than 20 million anthropological, biological and geological specimens, as well as 200 staff, students and other resident scientists. While in Chicago he also held appointments as Lecturer in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Professor Crane has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Zürich, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Vienna. He is currently Co-Editor of International Journal of Plant Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway College in the University of London. He is also a member of the Overseer's Visiting Committee for The Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and serves on the Council of the Smithsonian Institution, the Smithsonian Science Commission, and the Board of the Smithsonian's U.S. National Museum of Natural History. Professor Crane has also been a Senior Mellon Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A., a Visiting Research Fellow at The Natural History Museum in London, and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Kagawa University. He received the Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1984, the Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society in 1993, the Henry Allan Gleason Award of the New York Botanical Garden in 1998 and the Hutchinson Medal of the Chicago Botanical Garden in 2001. He served as President of the Paleontological Society from 1998-2000 and Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee for the International Botanical Congress held in St. Louis in 1999. Professor Crane currently serves on the Boards of the Lovaine Trust and Botanic Gardens Conservation International. He is also Patron of the Thomas Phillips Price Trust and a member of the Advisory Council of Plantlife. He received an Honorary Degree from Kingston University in 2002..

In addition to his administrative responsibilities Professor Crane continues his own research, which integrates studies of living and fossil plants to understand large-scale patterns and processes of plant evolution. He is the author of more than 100 scientific publications, including several books on plant evolution. Increasingly he is also engaged in a variety of initiatives focused on the conservation of plant diversity. While in Chicago he established the Office of Environmental and Conservation Programmes at the Field Museum, and was one of the early driving forces behind the formation of the Chicago Biodiversity Partnership (Chicago Wilderness Initiative) that now comprises more than 200 Chicago area organisations devoted to the conservation and restoration of plant and animal diversity in that region. At Kew he has strengthened the organisation's commitment to plant conservation. In the U.K. this has included active participation in the management and restoration of British biodiversity. Overseas, a particular focus has been capacity building, the provision of accurate information on plant diversity to facilitate the conservation and sustainable use of tropical plants, and implementation of the Millennium Seed Bank Project.