Biography

Pakistani botanist. Shahina Ghazanfar was educated at the Universities of Punjab and Cambridge, and has been based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, since 2001. She is co-editor of the Flora of Tropical East Africa, a detailed taxonomic account of the roughly 12,000 plant species found in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, for which she researched and wrote the account of the family Scrophulariaceae. She also co-organised, and edited the proceedings, of the 17th AETFAT Congress in Addis Ababa in 2003.

Her main areas of research are the systematics, vegetation, and biogeography of Oman, Arabia, and Pakistan. She has published a detailed account of the biochemistry and usage of Arabian medicinal plants and is the author of the first ever Flora of Oman. As an expert on the Arabian Peninsula, she is often consulted on its native flora, medicinal and perfume plants, and since 1992 has made numerous environmental assessments of development projects and proposed nature reserves in the region.

In addition to writing and editing scientific publications, she is an accomplished botanical artist who has illustrated most of her books and all her research papers. The British Council in Oman mounted a solo exhibition of her watercolours in 1993. She is on the editorial board of Systematics and Geography of Plants, and a member of the Linnean Society, AETFAT, IAPT, the Society for Arabian Studies, the Society of Economic Botany, and the Arabian Plant Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission, IUCN.

Dr Ghazanfar started her career as a lecturer in botany at Kinnaire College, Lahore, and at SUNY Syracuse, before joining the National Herbarium in Islamabad as a herbarium curator and researcher on the Flora of Pakistan. For her doctoral research at Cambridge, she revised the genus Silene L. sections Siphonomorpha Otth. and Auriculatae (Boiss.) Schischk. She left the National Herbarium in 1983 to take up a lectureship at Bayero University, Nigeria, where as well as lecturing she was keeper of the botanical garden and founding curator of the university herbarium, which specialises in collections from northern Nigeria.

From 1987 until 1997, she was an associate professor at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. There she created the country's second herbarium, housing some 4,000 accessioned specimens and a good collection of medicinal plants and lichens. She also gave curatorial assistance to its principal herbarium, the National Herbarium of Oman, which is located in the Museum of Natural History, and edited newsletters for the Horticultural Association of Oman and the Historical Association of Oman. From 1997 to 1999, she was funded by Cambridge University and DAAD to study the systematics, ethnobotany, and conservation status of the flora of the Arabian Peninsula. Afterwards she went to Fiji as a lecturer and researcher at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, and while there she conducted a vegetation survey of the smaller islands. She returned to Cambridge in 2001 as an Academic visitor to the Department of Plant Sciences at its Downing site and later that year she took up her current position at Kew.