Dr Olwen Grace is a botanist. Her research group at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew studies the global diversity of desert plants and their useful properties.
Our research combines phylogenetics with systematics and ecology, and uses evolutionary frameworks to investigate the chemical and utilitarian diversity of plants. We are particularly interested in the evolution of succulents—plants with specialised water-storing tissues—in regions where climate change is likely to influence their future value.
Biography
Dr Olwen Grace is a scientist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom. She leads Accelerated Taxonomy, a department specialising in describing, naming, classifying and identifying plant and fungal diversity. Working with partner scientists and organisations around the world, we are introducing new technologies and computational power as we race against time to describe plant diversity at risk of extinction.
Previously, Olwen was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and began her research career at the South African National Biodiversity Institute. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Pretoria, and my MSc and BSc (Hons) degrees in Botany from the University of Natal, in South Africa.
Olwen M. Grace 