Chris Thorogood
 Chris Thorogood with Victoria amazonica |
Chris Thorogood
Chris Thorogood (born 1983) is a leading British-born botanist, artist[1] and author, who has worked at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum since 2017 where he is currently the Deputy Director and Head of Science.[2] His research specialises in plant taxonomy, conservation, biomimetics, and public engagement with plant sciences. Thorogood is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and is an editor for the Journal Plants People Planet[3] for which he looks after the ‘Flora Obscura’ series.
Education
Thorogood read botany at the University of Bristol where he graduated in 2005 with the Departmental Prize for Biological Sciences. He read plant molecular biology for his PhD which he was awarded from the University of Bristol in 2009 for which he won a Faculty Prize and the Irene Manton Prize of the Linnean Society of London for the best thesis in botany.
Early Career
Thorogood was a postdoctoral research scientist in the field of plant molecular biology from 2009 to 2010, after which he worked for the American multinational manufacturer Mars, Incorporated before joining Britvic plc, a British producer of soft drinks, where he trained as a product development scientist and chemical engineer.
Thorogood returned to academic research and book-writing in 2017.
He completed an EPA Cephalosporin Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Linacre College where he is now an Adjunct Fellow.
Scientific Career
Thorogood lectures plant biology at the University of Oxford, where he holds the position of Deputy Director and Head of Science at Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum.
His research focusses on the evolution of parasitic.[4][5][6][7] and carnivorous plants[8][9], conservation of parasitic plants[10], plant diversity in the Mediterranean Basin and Japan, and the biomimetic applications of plants[11][12]
He was a pioneer in the discovery that host specificity drives the speciation of parasitic plants such as Orobanche, a group for which he later wrote the taxonomic account for Britain and Ireland[6]. This work resulted in the publication of new taxa of Orobanche. Recently, he established one of the world’s few parasitic plant conservation and research collections at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum which contains plants collected from around the world[10]. His work also highlighted a hitherto unknown parallel between the lives of endoparasitic plants and fungi – a rare example of a cross-kingdom convergence in the tree of life.[4]
Latterly he has worked on interdisciplinary projects that examine the functional and structural properties of carnivorous and aquatic plants together with physicists and mathematicians. His work on the carnivorous plant Nepenthes explored the functionality of the slippery surfaces and potential technological applications, revealing a potential mechanism for developing systems in which the transport of droplets is controlled by ‘energy railings’. These railings could provide a biomimetic means of transporting and sorting droplets in droplet-based fluidic devices and could enable the efficient mass transport of liquids along pre-determined pathways.[11]. Recently, Thorogood and collaborators showed that the gigantic floating leaves of Amazonian waterlilies occupy a large surface area at an economical material cost – a phenomenon that may have been driven by selection pressures favouring a large surface area at an economical material cost, for outcompeting other plants in fast-drying ephemeral pools. The simple design rules we used to accurately model the load-bearing properties of waterlilies may unlock cost-effective engineering solutions for the design of floating platforms for renewable energy production[12]
Thorogood is a wildlife artist and botanical illustrator, and an author of 11 books including specialist field guides to Mediterranean floras[13][14][15] and popular titles on plants.[16] He has travelled extensively[17] to document and research plants in the wild and published accounts of his field work. Working with collaborators overseas, his work has led to the description of new species for example, Thismia sitimeriamiae, a Critically Endangered ‘fairy lantern’ in Malaysia that may have been extinct before it became known to science.
Thorogood is an ambassador for plant sciences, and advocates that fostering care and attention for plants has never been more important at a time of significant biodiversity loss and extinction, coupled with a diminishing focus on plant sciences in tertiary education curricula worldwide.[18]
Oxford Botanic Garden
Thorogood lectures plant biology at the University of Oxford, where he holds the position of Deputy Director and Head of Science at Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum.[19][20] His research focusses on the evolution of parasitic[4][5][6][7] and carnivorous plants[8][21], conservation of parasitic plants[10], plant diversity in the Mediterranean Basin and Japan, and the biomimetic applications of plants.[11][12]
Thorogood won a scholarship in 2005 to carry out his PhD research on speciation in parasitic plants at the University of Bristol, for which he won the Irene Manton Prize for botany in 2010.[22]
Interviews
The botanist in a world of beautiful monsters
‘A striking work of nature’: the search for a rare flower in the Philippines jungle
Botanist is first westerner to see rare Rafflesia banaoana plant
The Science And Art Of Really Seeing Weird Plants
References
- ↑ GrrlScientist. "The Science And Art Of Really Seeing Weird Plants". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-09-01.
- ↑ "Dr Chris Thorogood". www.obga.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ "Plants, People, Planet Editorial Board". Wiley Online Library. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Thorogood, Chris J.; Teixeira‐Costa, Luiza; Ceccantini, Gregório; Davis, Charles; Hiscock, Simon J. (November 2021). "Endoparasitic plants and fungi show evolutionary convergence across phylogenetic divisions". New Phytologist. 232 (3): 1159–1167. doi:10.1111/nph.17556. ISSN 0028-646X. PMID 34251722 Check
|pmid=value (help). Unknown parameter|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 5.0 5.1 Thorogood, Chris J.; Leon, Christine J.; Lei, Di; Aldughayman, Majed; Huang, Lin‐fang; Hawkins, Julie A. (July 2021). "Desert hyacinths: An obscure solution to a global problem?". Plants, People, Planet. 3 (4): 302–307. doi:10.1002/ppp3.10215. ISSN 2572-2611. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Thorogood, Chris; Rumsey, Fred (2020-08-31). "An account of common broomrape Orobanche minor (Orobanchaceae) in the British Isles". British & Irish Botany. 2 (3). doi:10.33928/bib.2020.02.223. ISSN 2632-4970.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Thorogood, Chris; Santos, Jean Carlos (May 2020). "Langsdorffia : Creatures from the deep?". Plants, People, Planet. 2 (3): 181–185. doi:10.1002/ppp3.10102. ISSN 2572-2611.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Thorogood, Chris J.; Bauer, Ulrike; Hiscock, Simon J. (February 2018). "Convergent and divergent evolution in carnivorous pitcher plant traps". New Phytologist. 217 (3): 1035–1041. doi:10.1111/nph.14879. PMID 29131340. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Thorogood, Chris; Bauer, Ulrike (2020-06-19). "Shedding light on photosynthesis in carnivorous plants. A commentary on: 'Nepenthes × ventrata photosynthesis under different nutrient applications'". Annals of Botany. 126 (1): iv–v. doi:10.1093/aob/mcaa092. ISSN 1095-8290. PMC 7304462 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 32467971 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Thorogood, Chris; Witono, Joko Ridho; Mursidawati, Sofi; Fleischmann, Andreas (2022-03-23). "Parasitic plant cultivation: examples, lessons learned and future directions". Sibbaldia: The International Journal of Botanic Garden Horticulture (21): 109–136. doi:10.24823/Sibbaldia.2022.1892. ISSN 2513-9231. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Box, Finn; Thorogood, Chris; Hui Guan, Jian (2019-09-27). "Guided droplet transport on synthetic slippery surfaces inspired by a pitcher plant". Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 16 (158): 20190323. doi:10.1098/rsif.2019.0323. PMC 6769310 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 31480920. - ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Box, Finn; Erlich, Alexander; Guan, Jian H.; Thorogood, Chris (2022-02-11). "Gigantic floating leaves occupy a large surface area at an economical material cost". Science Advances. 8 (6): eabg3790. Bibcode:2022SciA....8G3790B. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg3790. ISSN 2375-2548. PMC 8827653 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 35138898 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ "Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Western Mediterranean, 2nd Edition". shop.kew.org. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ "Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Algarve 2nd". shop.kew.org. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ "Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Eastern Mediterranean". shop.kew.org. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ "Weird Plants". shop.kew.org. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ Spence, Madeleine. "Botanist is first westerner to see rare Rafflesia banaoana plant". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 2022-09-01.
- ↑ Siti-Munirah, Mat Yunoh; Dome, Nikong; Thorogood, Chris J. (2021-06-29). "Thismia sitimeriamiae (Thismiaceae), an extraordinary new species from Terengganu, Peninsular Malaysia". PhytoKeys (179): 75–89. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.179.68300. ISSN 1314-2003. PMC 8260551 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 34248369 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ "Dr Chris Thorogood | University of Oxford". www.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ "Dr Chris Thorogood". www.obga.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
- ↑ academic.oup.com https://academic.oup.com/aob/article/126/1/iv/5848403. Retrieved 2022-08-30. Missing or empty
|title=(help) - ↑ "Irene Manton Prize". linnean.org. Archived from the original on 27 November 2015. Retrieved 2022-08-30. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help)
External Links
Dr Chris Thorogood, Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum
The University of Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum
The Illustrating Botanist, Instagram
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