Announcing the New Phytologist Foundation
Last updated: 18 Sep, 2020
From today, the New Phytologist Trust is to be known as the New Phytologist Foundation.
The Trustees took the decision to rename to the New Phytologist Foundation to ensure that the organisation’s mission and ethos is clear to the broadest range of plant-focused researchers.
The New Phytologist Trust was founded in 1956 by Roy Clapham, Harry Godwin and Will James, Editors of the journal New Phytologist, which was itself established in 1902 by Sir Arthur Tansley. The most important tenet of the Trust was to steward ownership of the journal, and to ensure that any financial surplus generated from sales and investments was spent only to advance plant science.
The organisation remains true to this ethos today. Its activities include publishing the scholarly journals New Phytologist and Plants, People, Planet, and all excess revenues contribute towards funding a wide range of activities, such as the international New Phytologist Symposia and Workshop series, grants, and the sponsorship of various awards for early-stage career scientists, including the Tansley Medal named after New Phytologist’s founder Sir Arthur Tansley. These actions have a common goal to promote plant-focused research and to encourage continued progress and innovation in the field.
The Foundation remains a not-for-profit organisation, led by, and for, plant-focused researchers, and the Foundation will continue its aim to support researchers across the globe by facilitating the publication of high-quality research in its journals as well as in its outreach and charitable activities.
About the New Phytologist Foundation
The New Phytologist Foundation is an international not-for-profit organisation devoted to the promotion of plant-focused research, chaired by Professor Keith Lindsey (University of Durham, UK).
About the Chair of the Board of Trustees
Professor Keith Lindsey read Botany at St. Catherine's College Oxford, followed by a PhD from Edinburgh University. He carried out post-doc work in Edinburgh and then Rothamsted, before taking up a position as leader of the Plant Molecular Genetics Group at the Leicester Biocentre, and a lectureship at Leicester University (1989). He moved to a Chair in Durham in 1996.
His group’s research programme is focused on the developmental biology of plants, and in particular on molecular control mechanisms in embryogenesis and root development, making use of a range of techniques in functional genomics, and exploiting the many advantages of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model experimental organism. He is Visiting Professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, China. Professor Lindsey is an Editor of the journal New Phytologist and Chair of the Board of Trustees for the New Phytologist Foundation. He was until recently a member of BBSRC Council, the body that determines policy, priorities and strategy for BBSRC; Chair of BBSRC Appointments Board; and a member of the Defra Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), which advises Government Ministers on GM and related issues. He was President and Chair of Council of the Society for Experimental Biology and is currently Head of the School of Biological & Biomedical Sciences at Durham University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and of the Linnean Society of London.
Media Contact
SARAH LENNON, Executive Editor, New Phytologist Foundation
Tel: + 44 1524 594387
Email: s.lennon@lancaster.ac.uk
The New Phytologist Foundation, registered charity number 1154867