Biography

Anne E. Osbourn OBE FRS NAS is a Group Leader at the John Innes Centre and Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy Alliance. She is also a Trustee of the New Phytologist Foundation and an Editor of New Phytologist. Her research focuses on plant-derived natural products – function, synthesis, mechanisms of metabolic diversification and metabolic engineering. An important advance from the Osbourn laboratory has been the discovery that genes for specialized metabolic pathways are organized in ‘operon-like’ clusters in plant genomes, a finding that has opened up new opportunities for elucidation of new pathways and chemistries through genome mining. In 2023 Anne Osbourn received the Novozymes Prize for her pioneering research. Anne has developed and coordinates the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative, a cross-curricular science education outreach programme.