Professor John Stewart Parker is a British botanist and was the fifth Director, Cambridge University Botanic Garden (1996 – 2010), succeeding Donald Pigott.
[1] John Parker was educated at Oxford University, getting his D.Phil.
From Oxford he became Lecturer and then Reader in Genetics, Queen Mary College, University of London (1969 – 1992).
Subsequently, he became head of the Botany Department at Reading University (1992 – 1996) before moving to Cambridge in 1996 as Director of the Botanic Garden, Curator of the University Herbarium (1999 – 2010) and Professor of Plant Cytogenetics.
On the research side, Parker established the Genetics Garden in 1998, and oversaw the planning of the Sainsbury Laboratory which was officially opened in 2011.