Ottoline Leyser, 2012

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS is a Fellow of Clare. She is Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, Chief Executive Officer of UK Research and Innovation and the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge.

Who was your greatest Clare influence and why?

Clare is a community. I am inspired by the dedication, care and commitment of the Clare community- students, staff and fellows- working together to support each other in the interests of learning, teaching and research, and more than that, in the interests of humanity, at all scales.

Ottoline's Story

I was an undergraduate and PhD student at Newnham in the 1980s and, after some time in the US, came back briefly as junior research fellow before taking up a lectureship at the University of York, where I worked from 1994-2010. I moved back to Cambridge in 2011 to establish the Sainsbury Laboratory, a new interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to elucidating the regulatory mechanisms underpinning plant growth and development.

On my return to Cambridge, I was delighted to be invited to join Clare as a fellow. The ethos at Clare encapsulates so much of the joy, opportunities and responsibilities of academia that have shaped my career.

I have always been interested in how multiscale systems work, so it is not surprising that I was drawn to genetics, and to plant developmental genetics in particular. Somehow, plants can tune their development to suit the environmental conditions in which they are growing, and they can do this without a central organising centre. My research has focused on how this distributed decision-making system works. It has been a joy and a privilege to peruse these questions, and to share my enthusiasm with others through teaching, public engagement and research training.

Research is fundamentally an optimistic and empowering activity. It involves stepping into the unknown, with the tools to explore and understand it. These are tools of great value for everyone, in all walks of life. It has become clear that the way we now conceptualise research, as the domain of boffins, undermines rather than supports the collaborative, open minded, problem solving that should sit at its centre. I have therefore become increasingly interested in research policy and how we can tune the incentives in the research system to reposition it at the centre of our society- an endeavour to which everyone can contribute, and from which everyone benefits.

This ambition triggered my secondment to UK Research and Innovation in 2020. UKRI is the main public sector funder for research an innovation in the UK, and provides the opportunity to foster the kind of research and innovation system we need to bring people together to tackle the challenges we face, now and in the future.

Research and innovation are about three questions- What’s this? How does it work? and How can we make it better? My life has given me the tools, opportunity and confidence to follow these questions. I would like to help create the conditions in which everyone has these benefits.