Daphne Osborne - Education and Career

Education and Career

Born in India, where her father was a colonial administrator, Osborne attended The Perse School in Cambridge. Her BSc in chemistry and MSc in botany were from King's College London. Her PhD on the topic of plant growth regulators was from the University of London at Wye College, Kent, where her supervisor was R. Louis Wain. Her first postgraduate position was in the Department of Biology of the California Institute of Technology, USA, as a Fulbright Scholar, where she worked with botanist Fritz Went, among others.

Much of Osborne's career was spent at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), later renamed the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC). In 1952, she joined the ARC Unit of Experimental Agronomy at Oxford University, where she worked until the unit's closure in 1970. She then took up the position of deputy director at the new ARC Unit of Developmental Botany at the University of Cambridge. During her time in Cambridge, she became the first female fellow of Churchill College and also supervised the college's first female PhD student. After the unit's closure in 1978, she joined the AFRC Weed Research Organization at Begbroke just outside Oxford, where she worked until its closure in 1985, attaining the position of deputy chief scientific officer, a senior position in the British Civil Service.

In 1985, Osborne retired from the Civil Service, and became a visiting professor at the Department of Plant Sciences of Oxford University, as well as an honorary research fellow of the Open University and of Somerville College, Oxford. In 1991, she moved to the Oxford Research Unit of the Open University at Foxcombe Hall, Boars Hill, where she remained until her death in 2006. During her time at the Open University, she headed international research projects of the Royal Society, and also attracted funding from Unilever, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Osborne travelled widely during her career, holding short-term positions at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology in the USA, and visiting Argentina, Australia, India, Israel, Malaysia, Nigeria and South Africa. She also formed many international collaborations, latterly with scientists in China and Ukraine. In 1988, she organised a successful international NATO workshop in Turin, Italy.