John L. Harper

Who was John L. Harper?

John Lander Harper CBE FRS was a British biologist, specializing in ecology and plant population biology.

He was born in 1925 and educated at Lawrence Sheriff School, Rugby. He obtained his degree in Botany in and his MA and MPhil from Oxford. After a further nine years conducting research at the Department of Agriculture, Oxford, and a sabbatical as Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Davis, he was in 1967 appointed head of Agricultural Botany at Bangor University North Wales.

He served as president of the British Ecological Society and of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1978 and was their Darwin Medal recipient for 1990. He received the Millennium Botany Award in 1999 and the Marsh Ecology Award from the BES the same year. He was awarded CBE in 1989.

He has authored several textbooks on ecology and population biology.

The British Ecological Society awards the John L. Harper Young Investigator's prize annually to the best paper in Journal of Ecology by a young author. He was a member of the British Humanist Association.