Professor Alexandre Antonelli is the Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He is also Professor in Biodiversity and Systematics at the University of Gothenburg and Visiting Professor at the Department of Plant Science at the University of Oxford. He was the founder and first Director of the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, established during his time as Scientific Curator of the Gothenburg Botanical Garden. Antonelli’s passion is nature, and his mission mirrors that of RBG Kew’s: to understand and protect biodiversity for the well-being of people and the future of all life on Earth. To this end, he studies the distribution, evolution, threats and sustainable uses of species and develops methods to speed up scientific discovery and innovation. His research focuses on the tropics, where most species occur and the threats are most acute. Most recently he has been particularly interested in the application of machine learning techniques for biodiversity research and conservation. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and his work has been cited over 12,000 times. He was named on the Web of Science/Clarivate 2020 and 2021 ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list, which identifies pioneering researchers in the top 1% of their field.