A SCIENTIST at the University of Reading has been named the recipient of a prize in recognition of their work in botany.
Dr Jamie Thompson was awarded the Irene Manton Prize by the Linnean Society of London, recognising his PhD thesis as the best doctoral thesis in botany submitted to a UK university in the past year.
The prize was announced on Wednesday, April 9, as part of the Linnean Society’s annual medals and awards, which celebrate outstanding contributions to understanding and protecting the natural world.
Dr Thompson’s doctoral research, titled “Tempo and drivers of angiosperm diversification” was carried out at the University of Bath and tackled one of evolutionary biology’s greatest puzzles: how flowering plants came to dominate Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.
Using powerful statistical methods and vast datasets spanning tens of thousands of species, Dr Thompson explored how climate, geography, and evolutionary innovation shaped plant diversity across our planet.
His analyses uncovered a strong link between global cooling during the Cenozoic era and bursts of diversification in orchids.
This revealed that falling temperatures may have helped fuel one of the planet’s richest plant radiations (an increase in diversity).
The research also challenged long-held theories about succulent plants, demonstrating that not all succulent lineages diversified in the same way or at the same time.
This is contrary to decades of established theory that linked their origins directly to planetary aridification.
Dr Thompson employed cutting-edge machine learning techniques to identify five key factors shaping cactus biodiversity, creating a methodological roadmap for understanding complexity in other plant groups.
His work also provided strong evidence that flowering plants showed extraordinary resilience during the mass extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs, weathering a global catastrophe that destroyed many animal lineages.
The Irene Manton Prize is awarded annually for the best thesis in botany examined for a doctorate of philosophy in a UK university.
It honours the legacy of Professor Irene Manton, a pioneering botanist who made major contributions to understanding plants.
On receiving the award, Dr Thompson said: “I always wanted to be an evolutionary biologist, and it is humbling to win the Irene Manton Prize for the best PhD in the field.
“It would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of so many people.”
