Sir Ghillean Prance FRS
Lyme Regis
United Kingdom
Major prize: International Cosmos Prize
Biographical information is not available at present.
Professor Sir Ghillean Prance was born in Suffolk in 1937 and was educated at Malvern College and Keble College Oxford where he obtained a BA in Botany and a D.Phil. His career began at the New York Botanical Garden in 1963 as a research assistant and subsequently B A Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany, Director and Vice-President of Research and finally Senior Vice President for Science. His exploration of Amazonia included 15 expeditions in which he collected over 350 new species of plants. He was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 1988 to 1999. He was McBryde Professor at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii 2001-02 and is currently McBryde Senior Fellow there. He is Scientific Director and a Trustee of the Eden Project in Cornwall and Visiting Professor at Reading University. He is author of nineteen books and has published over 520 scientific and general papers in taxonomy, ethnobotany, economic botany, conservation and ecology. He holds fifteen honorary doctorates and in 1993 received the International COSMOS Prize and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was knighted in July 1995 and received the Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1999. He received the David Fairchild Medal for plant exploration in 2000, and the Allerton Award in 2005. In 2000 he was made a Commander of the Order of the Southern Cross by the President of Brazil. He continues to be active with research in plant systematics and in conservation of the tropical rainforest. He chairs the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest Trust, the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO), A Rocha International and the Development Committee of the Eden Project and is a board member of the Amazon Charitable Trust and the Exbury Gardens Trust. He is President of The Wildflower Society, Nature in Art and the International Tree Foundation.
Publications
» View Ghillean Prance's publications at WorldCat