John L. Harper

John Lander Harper CBE FRS (27 May 1925 – 22 March 2009) was a British biologist, specializing in ecology and plant population biology.

He obtained his degree in Botany in (1946) and his MA and DPhil (1950) from Oxford with his doctoral thesis An investigation of the interaction of soil micro-organisms with special reference to the study of the bacterial population of plant root systems.

Dr Harper spent a further nine years conducting research at the Department of Agriculture, Oxford, and a sabbatical as Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Davis, he was in 1967 appointed head of the newly formed School of Plant Biology at Bangor University North Wales.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1978 and was their Darwin Medal recipient for 1990.

The British Ecological Society awards the John L. Harper Young Investigator's prize annually to the best paper in Journal of Ecology by a young author.