David Baulcombe
British geneticist
Sir David Charles Baulcombe FMedSci FRS (born 7 April 1952) is a British plant scientist and geneticist. He was Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge (Emeritus since 2019) and is currently Biological Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society. In 2026, Baulcombe was announced as the next Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Early life and education
David Baulcombe was born on 7 April 1952 in the United Kingdom, in Solihull, Warwickshire, (in England's Midlands), into what he describes as "a non-scientific family".
As a child growing up in England’s West Midlands, David Baulcombe developed a fascination for algae, mosses, and other ‘lower plants’, which eventually led him to study botany at Leeds before shifting his focus to molecular biology.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in botany from the University of Leeds in 1973, and continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977 for research on Messenger RNA in vascular plants, supervised by John Ingle.
Career
After his doctoral research, Baulcombe spent the next four years as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University from January 1977 to November 1978, and then at the University of Georgia until December 1980. He then moved to the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge (PBI) from 1980 until 1988 before joining the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich in 1988. In March 2007 he became the professor of botany at the University of Cambridge and in 2009 was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2009, the Cambridge professorship was renamed "Regius Professor of Botany": the first Regius Professorship created by Queen Elizabeth II.
Since 2024, David Baulcombe has been Biological Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Baulcombe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.