Richard Bardgett - Biography#

Richard was brought up in Cumbria, northern England, and graduated from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1987 with a degree in Soil and Land Resource Science. He completed his PhD in 1991 at Lancaster University. He moved to Manchester in 2013, having previously worked for the Nature Conservancy Council, the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, and the Universities of Manchester and Lancaster. He returned to Lancaster in 2025 to establish a new Centre for Sustainable Soils.

He was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2006 and a Member Academia Europaea in 2015 for his pioneering contributions to soil ecology. He is routinely recognised by Clarivate as one of the most highly cited ecologists in the world and served as President of the British Ecological Society (2017-2019). He is currently Exective Editor of Journal fo Ecology and in 2023 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by King Charles III for services to soil ecology and climate change science.

Richard has a strong commitment to increasing awareness of the need to protect soils and their biodiversity. He currently serves on Defra’s Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) and in 2019 was appointed “Thinker in Residence” for the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium to advise policy decisions on “Soils as Natural Capital”, including recommendations on soil protection to comply with policy on climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. He was a co-founder, and current co-Director, of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI), established in 2011 to promote translation of soil biodiversity knowledge into policy.