Date/Time: 11th October 2016

Even more than before, we need sustainable solutions to the issues we face, whether in:

• agriculture
• food production and security
• our health
• the well-being of our planet

Understanding the natural world underpins all of these potential solutions, and the study of biological sciences in its many disciplines offers us a way into the knowledge we need.

As scientists living in the material world, Professor Bowles believes we have a responsibility to use our science to benefit society. Often this means we have to think beyond data and the quietude of the research laboratory and become involved in policy, supply chains and international markets.

About the speaker

Emeritus Professor Dianna Bowles graduated in 1970 with a BSc in Botany from Newcastle University, before completing a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Her research looks at providing data to support evidence-based policy in livestock agriculture, nationally and internationally. Her focus, as Chair of The Sheep Trust, are breeds that are locally adapted to their environments, recognised as living heritage and continuing to be commercially farmed in distinct regions of the UK as well as elsewhere throughout the world.

Professor Bowles was at Leeds University from 1979-1993 before moving to the University of York in 1994, where she directed her own plant biochemistry/molecular biology research group and founded and led The Plant Laboratory as Established Chair of Biochemistry. In 1997 she went on to design and direct the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) for biology to benefit society. The Centre was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of research to support the Bio-Economy in 2005.

Professor Bowles is widely published, with 150 publications in journals such as Science and Nature. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2001 and was nominated to Fellowship of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (2002). She was awarded an OBE for public services in the sciences in 2004.