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Magdalene College
Cambridge
CB3 0AG

Professor P J Grubb

Emeritus Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Investigative Plant Ecology

Background

Professor Grubb came to Magdalene in 1954 as a £100 Scholar from the Royal Liberty School, an outstanding Grammar School in Essex. He read Natural Sciences, and began research in plant physiology (with a particular interest in mosses), though he also gained experience in plant ecology on several expeditions (notably to what is now Kosovo in 1956, 59 and 62, to Colombia in 1957 and to Ecuador in 1960). He was elected a Bye-Fellow in 1958, and was made an Official Fellow in 1961 when he became a University Demonstrator. After a sabbatical in Australia in 1963 he made ecology his research field. He was successively Lecturer, Reader and Professor in the Botany Department (now Plant Sciences). In Magdalene he served as a Tutor (1963-74), Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (1980-96), President (1991-96) and Acting Master (Michaelmas Term 1994). In 1990-91 he was President of the British Ecological Society (of which he is now an Honorary Member) and the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He was a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, New York State in 1982 and 1987. He became an Emeritus Fellow in 2002. His greatest interest outside his work is in the history of architecture.

Research

Professor Grubb has carried out significant research is a very wide range of vegetation-types from tropical rain forest to desert, and has travelled extensively on all continents bar Antarctica. He is best known for his work on vegetational dynamics and especially the mechanisms whereby the coexistence of many species in a single plant community is maintained. Within Britain he has studied particularly the grasslands and scrub communities found on the chalk. He has also contributed to our understanding of plant-soil relations, plant defences against herbivores, competition among plants, and the form and function of leaves. He co-edited the Journal of Ecology 1972-77, and Toward a More Exact Ecology (1989), and was co-author of 100 Years of Plant Sciences in Cambridge 1904-2004. font>

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