Katherine Jane Willis is a biologist, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and an adjunct Professor in Biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected as Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up this position from 1 October. She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford. Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013-2018.
Following her PhD, Willis held a Selwyn College, Cambridgepostdoctoral research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, a Natural Environment Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Plant Sciences, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Godwin Institute for Quaternary Research, University of Cambridge. In 1999 she moved to a lectureship in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, where she established the Oxford Long-term Ecology Laboratory in 2002. Willis was made a professor of long-term ecology in 2008, and on 1 October 2010 became the first Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity and director of the James Martin Biodiversity Institute in Zoology. In addition to her position in Oxford she is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is a trustee of WWF-UK, a panel member on the advisory board for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, a trustee of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust, an international member on the Swedish Research Council's FORMAS evaluation panel, and a college member of the UK Natural Environment Research Council. From 2012 to 2013 she held the elected position of director-at-large of the International Biogeography Society. In 2013 she was appointed Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on a 5-year secondment from the University of Oxford. BBC Radio started to broadcast in October 2014 an "indefinite" series of documentary talks about the scientific and social history of the Kew collection. On 1 October 2018, Willis succeeded Keith Gull as Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Willis's research focuses on reconstructing long term responses of ecosystems to environmental change, including climate change, human impact and sea level rise. She argues that understanding long-term records of ecosystem change is essential for a proper understanding of future ecosystem responses. Many scientific studies are limited to short-term datasets that rarely span more than 40 to 50 years, although many larger organisms, including trees and large mammals, have an average generation time which exceeds this timescale. Short-term records therefore are unable to reconstruct natural variability over time, or the rates of migration as a result of environmental change. She also argues that a short-term approach gives a static view of ecosystems, and leads to the conceptual formation of an unrealistic "norm" which must be maintained or restored and protected. Her research group in the Oxford Long-term Ecology laboratory therefore attempts to reconstruct ecosystem responses to environmental change on timescales ranging from tens to millions of years, and the applications of long-term records in biodiversity conservation. She has argued that the impacts of contemporary climate change on plant biota is uncertain and potentially not as severe as researchers envision, and challenged assumptions made in the interpretation of spatially constrained temperature records. Kew's State of the World's Plants report pinpoints land cover change as the major threat to global biodiversity, not climate change. Willis's research has been published in leading peer reviewedscientific journals including Nature, Science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Conservation. and Quaternary Science Reviews. With Jennifer McElwain she co-authored the textbook The Evolution of Plants. Her research has been funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
