Professor John H Lawton, CBE FRS
John Lawton trained as a zoologist at the University of Durham, where he completed his PhD in 1969. From Durham he moved to be Demonstrator in Ecology in the Department of Zoology at Oxford for three years, before moving to the Biology Department at the University of York in 1971. He was awarded a Personal Chair at York in 1985. In 1989 he founded, and was appointed Director of, the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, Silwood Park, where he remained until 1999. He took up his present post as Chief Executive of NERC in October 1999, but retains his Professorship in an honorary capacity at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. His scientific interests are wide, but have focussed on the population dynamics and biodiversity of birds and insects, with emphasis over the last decade of the impacts of global environmental change on wild plants and animals. He has published over 320 scientific papers, and written or edited five books.
During his career he has served on a wide range of committees and bodies, including the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Tarmac Environmental Advisory Panel, and the Councils of the British Ecological Society (BES), Freshwater Biological Association, NERC, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). He was Chairman of RSPB for five years and is currently a Vice-President of both RSPB and the British Trust for Ornithology. Awards and honours include the President's Gold Medal of the BES, the ECI Prize Winner 1996 for Terrestrial Ecology, the BES Marsh Award for Ecology, the Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologists, the Frink Medal of the Institute of Zoology, Honorary Membership of the Royal Entomological Society and the Society for Conservation Biology's Edward T. LaRoe III Memorial Award. He has held, or currently holds, honorary positions in the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, New York, the Natural History Museum, London, the Department of Biology at the University of York, and the Institute of Arable Crops Research, Rothamsted.
