Professor Roy Ellen, Emeritus Professor in the School of Anthropology and Conservation (SAC) has been honoured as the Distinguished Economic Botanist for 2017 by The Society for Economic Botany (SEB).
The SEB said the award recognises Professor Ellen’s ‘major contributions to economic and ethnobotany’ over the last 35 years, based on his ‘meticulous and intensive field research that has greatly enriched the fields of economic botany, ethnobiology, and environmental anthropology’.
This work has covered numerous environmental, cognitive anthropology and ethnobiology topics, ranging from folk classification and the local management of inter-island trading systems and the ethnography of eastern Indonesia.
Professor Ellen (pictured left) will receive his award in Bragança, Portugal on 8 June during the 58th meeting of The Society for Economic Botany. Previous winners of the Distinguished Economic Botanist award include Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, Richard Schultes, Nancy Turner, Harold Conklin and Brent Berlin.
Professor Ellen is also a Fellow of the British Academy and was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 2007 and 2011.
The award is the second recent high-profile success for the School of Anthropology and Conservation in 2017 after Professor Richard Griffiths was awarded the Zoological Society of London’s Marsh Award for Conservation Biology.