The Baroness Willis of Summertown | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Willis in 2017 | |
| Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal | |
| Assumed office 8 July 2022 Life peerage | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Katherine Jane Willis 16 January 1964 London, England |
| Political party | Crossbench |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
| Alma mater |
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| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Late Quaternary vegetational history of Epirus, northwest Greece (1990) |
Katherine Jane Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, CBE, FGS[2] (born 16 January 1964)[3] is a British biologist, academic and life peer, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford,[4] and an adjunct professor in biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up the position from 1 October.[5] She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford.[6][7] Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013 to 2018.[8] Her nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission as a crossbench life peer was announced on 17 May 2022.
Katherine Jane Willis was born on 16 January 1964 in London to Edward George Willis and Winifred Ellen Willis (née Dymond).[3] She gained an undergraduate degree in geography and environmental science from the University of Southampton, and a PhD in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge for research on the vegetational history of the late Quaternary period in Epirus, northwest Greece.[9]
At the University of Cambridge, Willis held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Selwyn College, a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Plant Sciences, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) in the Godwin Institute for Quaternary Research. In 1999, she moved to a lectureship in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, where she established the Oxford Long-term Ecology Laboratory in 2002. Willis was made a professor of long-term ecology in 2008,[10] and in October 2010 became the first Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity and director of the James Martin Biodiversity Institute in Zoology.[citation needed] She was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Bergen, Norway.[citation needed] She is a trustee of WWF-UK,[11] a panel member on the advisory board for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, a trustee of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust, an international member on the Swedish Research Council's FORMAS evaluation panel, and a college member of the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).[citation needed] From 2012 to 2013 she held the elected position of director-at-large of the International Biogeography Society.[12] In 2013, she was appointed Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,[8] on a 5-year secondment from the University of Oxford.[13] On 1 October 2018, Willis succeeded Keith Gull as Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.[14]
Willis's research[15] focuses on reconstructing long term responses of ecosystems to environmental change, including climate change, human impact and sea level rise. She argues that understanding long-term records of ecosystem change is essential for a proper understanding of future ecosystem responses. Many scientific studies are limited to short-term datasets that rarely span more than 40 to 50 years, although many larger organisms, including trees and large mammals, have an average generation time which exceeds this timescale. Short-term records therefore are unable to reconstruct natural variability over time, or the rates of migration as a result of environmental change. She also argues that a short-term approach gives a static view of ecosystems, and leads to the conceptual formation of an unrealistic "norm" which must be maintained or restored and protected. Her research group in the Oxford Long-term Ecology laboratory therefore attempts to reconstruct ecosystem responses to environmental change on timescales ranging from tens to millions of years, and the applications of long-term records in biodiversity conservation. She has argued that the impacts of contemporary climate change on plant biota is uncertain and potentially not as severe as researchers envision,[16] and challenged assumptions made in the interpretation of spatially constrained temperature records.[17] Kew's State of the World's Plants report (2016) pinpoints land cover change as the major threat to global biodiversity, not climate change.[18]
Willis's research has been published in Nature,[19] Science,[20][21][22][23][24] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,[25] Biological Conservation.[26] and Quaternary Science Reviews.[27] With Jennifer McElwain[28] she co-authored the textbook The Evolution of Plants.[29] Her research has been funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).[30]
She was nominated as a life peer by the House of Lords Appointments Commission on 17 May 2022.[31] She was created Baroness Willis of Summertown on 8 July 2022.[32] Hers was the last peerage created by Elizabeth II. She made her maiden speech on 8 September 2022 during a debate on Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security.[33] She sits as a non-party-political crossbench peer.[34]
Willis married Andrew Gant, a composer and Liberal Democrat politician,[35] in 1992. They have two sons and a daughter.[3]
