Liam Dolan

Education Dolan was educated at University College Dublin and the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded a PhD in 1991 for genetic analysis of leaf development in the cotton plant Gossypium barbadense supervised by Scott Poethig.

Career and research Following his PhD, Dolan spent three years doing postdoctoral research at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. After 13 years as an independent project leader in Norwich, Dolan moved to Oxford as the Sherardian Professor of Botany in 2009 to 2021.

Dolan's research aims to define genetic mechanisms that control the development of plants and determine how these mechanisms have changed since plants colonised the land 500 million years ago. Dolan's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Dolan has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of the development and evolution of land plant rooting systems. He was the first to define the precise cellular body plan of the Arabidopsis root and discovered the molecular genetic mechanism governing root hair cell differentiation.

Awards and honours Dolan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. and was awarded the President's Medal of the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) in 2001. In 2024, Dolan was elected a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences