Sarah Darwin

Sarah Catherine Darwin FLS (born 1 April 1964 in London) is a British botanist. She is the daughter of George Erasmus Darwin, a metallurgist, and his wife Shuna (née Service). She has two older brothers; Robert George Darwin (born 1959) and the conservationist Chris Darwin (born 1961). She is descended from Charles Darwin via Charles's son George Howard Darwin (1845–1912), an astronomer, his son William Robert Darwin (1894–1970), a stockbroker and brother of the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, and his wife Sarah Monica (née Slingsby) were the parents of George Erasmus Darwin (1927-2017). Darwin first visited the Galapagos Islands in 1995 with her parents and brother Chris on holiday. She stayed behind to prepare botanical illustrations for a field guide to the Islands. She is an ambassador for the conservation charity Galapagos Conservation Trust. She gained a BSc in Botany from Reading University in 1999 and a PhD from University College London in 2009. Her PhD thesis was entitled The systematics and genetics of tomatoes on the Galápagos Islands. Her supervisors were Sandra Knapp, James Mallet and Ziheng Yang.