Year of Honorary Fellowship, 2017
Charles Godfray is a population biologist with broad interests in the environmental sciences and has published in fundamental and applied areas of ecology, evolution and epidemiology. He has had a lifelong interest in entomology (joining the RES in 1979) and much of his research has involved insects and in particular parasitoids. He is also a naturalist with a specialist interest in the taxonomy of two subfamilies of Braconidae, the minute but diverse parasitoid wasps in the Alysiinae and Opiinae.
Charles is Director of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, where he also directs the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food. He is interested in how the global food system will need to change and adapt to the challenges facing humanity in the 21stcentury, and in particular in the concept of sustainable intensification, and the relationship between food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity. He is Chair of Defra’s (the UK’s environment and agriculture department) Science Advisory Council, and a Trustee Director of Rothamsted Research and a trustee of the Food Foundation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and knighted for services to science and science advice to government in 2017.
