Peter Crane

Sir Peter R. Crane ( born July 18, 1954 in Kettering ( Northamptonshire ))) is a British botanist and paleontologist. 1999 to 2006 he was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Life

Crane studied at the University of Reading, where he was from 1978 to 1981 a member of the faculty. 1981/82 he was a post- doctoral student at Indiana University. From 1982 he was an assistant curator in the Department of Geology of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 1992 to 1999 he was vice president and then director there and had overall responsibility for the scientific program. After his time as director at Kew he went back in 2006 as a professor at the University of Chicago. From 2009, he is Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Zurich, the University of Vienna, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Texas. He was a visiting scientist at the Natural History Museum in London and at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

Crane is concerned with the macro-evolution (evolution pattern ) both fossil as well as extant plants. He is also working for the conservation of biodiversity. In 2004 he was knighted. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1998), in whose advice he is, and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (2001) and a member of the Leopoldina. In 1993 he was awarded the Charles Schuchert Award and in 1984 the Bicentennary Medal of the Linnean Society. He received the 1998 Henry Allan Gleason Award of the New York Botanical Garden and 2001, the Hutchinson Medal of the Chicago Botanical Garden. 1998 to 2000 he was president of the Paleontological Society. He is an honorary member of the Palaeontological Association.

In 1999, he led the scientific program of the International Congress of Botanists in St. Louis. He is the Council of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.

Writings

  • Else Marie Friis with Kay Raunsgaard Pedersen Early flowers and agiosperm evolution, Cambridge University Press 2011
  • Paul Kenrick The origin and early diversification of land plants: a cladistic study, Smithsonian Institution Press 1997
  • Published by Else Marie Friis with, William G. Chaloner The Origins of angiosperms and Their biological Consequences, Cambridge University Press 1987
Botany Kew (disambiguation)
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