Dame Henrietta Miriam Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS (born 7 March 1965)[4] is a British plant biologist and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge who is on secondment as CEO of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

[6] She was educated at Wychwood School in Oxford[7] and the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Newnham College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences in 1986 followed by a PhD in Genetics[8] in 1990 for research supervised by Ian Furner.

Her nomination reads: Ottoline Leyser has made unique and central contributions to understanding of development.

She isolated several of the key mutants and has elucidated downstream pathways of hormone action, using this knowledge to characterise the control of shoot architecture.

[4] She has been a guest of Jim Al-Khalili on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific multiple times.