LED3 Lecture Announcement: Professor Anne Osbourn

LED3 Lecture Announcement: Professor Anne Osbourn, Jan 29, 2026

We are excited to announce that Professor Anne Osbourne will give the next LED3 lecture on January 29^th. Anne is group leader and deputy director at the John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK), and Professor at the University of East Anglia. Anne’s   research programme focusses on plant natural products – biosynthesis, function, mechanisms of metabolic diversification – and on harnessing plant chemistry for medicinal, agricultural and industrial applications. An important advance from here laboratory has been the discovery that genes for specialized metabolic pathways can be organized in ‘operon-like’ clusters in plant genomes, a finding that has opened up new opportunities for elucidation of new pathways and chemistries through genome mining. In 2023 Anne received the Novozymes Prize for her pioneering research. Anne is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO). She is also a poet, and founder of the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative (www.sawtrust.org), a cross-curricular science education outreach programme. Her prize-winning poetry collection ‘Mock Orange’ was published in 2020.

After the talk, there will be a borrel outside the lecture hall.