Janice Lord

Janice Marjorie Lord is a New Zealand academic, a plant evolutionary biologist, and as of 2025 is a full professor at the University of Otago, where she is the curator of the Otago Regional Herbarium.

Academic career

After a PhD titled The evolutionary ecology of Festuca novae-zelandiae in mid-Canterbury, New Zealand, submitted to the University of Canterbury in 1992, Lord moved to the Department of Botany at the University of Otago, where she became an associate professor in 2017 and a full professor in 2025.

Lord's research focuses on how the New Zealand fauna have shaped plant flora through pollination and fruit dispersal systems. She has worked particularly on alpine plant communities, but has also published on subantarctic megaherbs, and the use of traditional knowledge of native plants in botany. She is also interested in mycorrhizal flora for ecological restoration, and carbon sequestration by native plants. She is a principal investigator for the 1 Billion Trees project, and is part of the Otago Climate Change Network.

Lord received the Leonard Cockayne Lecture Award in 2015; she was only the second female recipient after Lucy Moore won the first award in 1965. Lord gave her lectures on subantarctic flora.

In 2017, Lord featured as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's 150 women in 150 words, celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.

Selected works