Introduction
Liam Dolan, FRS is a botanist and academic. He is the Sherardian Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Education
Dolan was educated at University College Dublin and the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded a PhD in 1991 for genetic analysis of leaf development in the cotton plant Gossypium barbadense supervised by Scott Poethig.
Career and research
Following his PhD, Dolan spent three years doing postdoctoral research at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. After 13 years as an independent project leader in Norwich, Dolan moved to Oxford as the Sherardian Professor of Botany in 2009.
Dolan's research aims to define genetic mechanisms that control the development of plants and determine how these mechanisms have changed since plants colonized the land 500 million years ago. Dolan's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
With Alison Mary Smith, George Coupland, Nicholas Harberd, Jonathan D. G. Jones, Cathie Martin, Robert Sablowski and Abigail Amey he is a co-author of the textbook Plant Biology.
Awards and honours
Dolan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His certificate of election reads:
Dolan is also en elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and was awarded the Presidents Medal of the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) in 2001.