Mark Nesbitt is Senior Research Leader for Interdisciplinary Research and Curator of the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His research interests centre on plant-people relationships through time, with a particular interest in the repurposing of historic collections to address contemporary issues. Drawing on Kew’s collections he works with source communities in the Brazilian Amazon, India and Aotearoa. Mark has a particular interest in materials such as basketry, paper, textiles and dyes, and in medicinal plants. His books include Curating biocultural collections (2014), Just the tonic: a natural history of tonic water (2019), and An ancient Mesopotamian herbal (2023). He is a past-president of the Society for Ethnobotany, current president of the British Society for the History of Pharmacy, and an honorary professor in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.
