“I am hoping for concrete plans”
Professor Alexandre Antonelli will be attending the UN’s climate summit COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland 31 October to 12 November. He is a professor of biological diversity and systematics at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford and research director at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom.
Professor Alexandre Antonelli is scientific director at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He is also a professor of biological diversity and systematics at the University of Gothenburg and visiting professor at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. He is the founder of the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre and has also served as the scientific curator at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden.
Antonelli’s mission is the same as that of RBG Kew: to understand and protect biological diversity for the well-being of humans and the future of all life on Earth. To achieve this, he studies distribution, development, threats and sustainable use of species and develops methods to speed scientific discoveries and innovations. His research focuses on the tropics, where most species are found and where the threat is most acute. Most recently, his attention has been on applications of machine learning for research and the preservation of biological diversity. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and his work has been cited over 11,000 times.