Sue Hartley facts for kids
Susan Elaine Hartley OBE is a British scientist who studies how living things interact with their environment. This is called ecology. She is currently a Vice-President for Research at the University of Sheffield. Before this, she led the York Environmental Sustainability Institute (YESI) at the University of York. She was also a Professor of Ecology at the University of Sussex. Her work often looks at how plants and animals interact with each other. In 2009, she gave the famous Royal Institution Christmas Lectures about the long history of life on Earth.
Learning and Studying
Sue Hartley went to St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford in England. There, she earned a first degree called a BA in biochemistry. This is the study of the chemistry of living things.
After that, she continued her studies at the University of York. She earned a higher degree called a DPhil, which is like a PhD. Her research focused on ecology. She studied how plants protect themselves from insects that try to eat them.
Her Work as a Scientist
Sue Hartley worked at a research center near Aberdeen in Scotland. There, she studied how plant-eating animals, like red deer and sheep, eat plants. She looked at how this affected the open, grassy areas called moorlands.
In 2001, she moved to the University of Sussex. She became a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences. At Sussex, her research team studied how plants defend themselves from being eaten. They also looked at how plants reacting to plant-eaters affects other living things.
Her work also included studying how plants and plant-eating animals interact in different parts of the world. For example, she studied how camels and goats eating too much grass in the Sinai desert affects the land. She also researched how insects eating young tropical trees in Borneo and Uganda impacts the forests.
Professor Hartley also gave advice to important groups like the European Food Safety Authority and the European Commission. She advised them on how genetically modified organisms might affect the environment. She was also the leader of the British Ecological Society from 2016 to 2017.
She helps guide other important organizations too. She is a Trustee for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which is a famous plant research center. She also served on the board for Natural England, an organization that protects England's natural environment.
In 2019, she received a special award called an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). This award was given to her by the Queen for her important work in ecological research and for sharing science with the public.
