David Lewis obituary
My friend David Lewis, who has died aged 85, was an academic botanist and pro-vice chancellor at the University of Sheffield.
David’s scientific speciality was the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and their plant partners. Away from university administrative duties, he also served as editor (1970-1983) and then executive editor (1983-1995) of the New Phytologist, elevating its status from a national to an international botanical journal. He was a regular contributor to the publication himself; his last paper appeared just two years before he died.
He was born to Emlyn Lewis and his wife, Eluned (nee Hopkin), who together ran a tobacconists in Neath, south Wales, where David developed an early interest in plants. He was sent as a boarder to Colston’s school (now Collegiate school) in Bristol at the age of nine, and after national service in the RAF went to Queen’s College Oxford to study botany.
In 1966 he secured a lectureship in the botany department at the University of Sheffield. Moving swiftly up the academic hierarchy, he was awarded a personal chair in 1983 and became head of department in 1987.
During the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher instituted some major changes in higher education, small academic units such as the botany department at Sheffield were deemed “inefficient”, and so the university merged it with zoology in 1988 to become the department of animal and plant sciences, with David as its chair.
Under his leadership, the new department prospered and became one of the most respected in the country.
In 1995 David was made pro-vice chancellor for research at Sheffield, a prestigious post but in some minor ways a poisoned chalice. One of the first things he had to implement after his appointment was the introduction of car-parking charges at the university – an idea he had previously opposed quite vociferously.
After serving as pro-vice-chancellor for four years, David returned to academic life within the department of animal and plant sciences, and retired in 2002.
Outside the university, he was a trustee of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens Trust, and helped to secure a large Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 1996 to pay for the garden’s much-needed restoration.
He is survived by his wife, Diana (nee Petrie), a district nurse, whom he married in 1990, and his two children, Tom and Katie, from his first marriage to Rachel Waterfall, which ended in divorce.