Professor Kathy Willis, Associate Director of the Oxford Martin School's Biodiversity Institute, has been awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences.

The Faraday Prize and Lecture is "awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary", the Society says.

Professor Willis, Director of Science, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, last year presented the 25-part series From Roots to Riches on BBC Radio 4. The series told the story of the birth of modern botany, and examined how subsequent changes in scientific, economic and social preoccupations have influenced our attitudes to plants – from tools to exploit for food, fuel and industry, to objects of beauty, to being an essential global resource that must be conserved.

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