World leading scientist joins JCU
World-renowned ecologist and conservation biologist Dr William Laurance is joining James Cook University’s School of Marine & Tropical Biology.
He has been appointed as a Research Professor and will be based at the JCU campus in Cairns.
Before coming to JCU, Professor Laurance was a Senior Scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in the US, one of the world’s leading research organisations.
He has lived and worked in the jungles of the Amazon and central Africa, studying the impacts of habitat fragmentation, logging, roads, hunting, and fires on tropical forests and their various plant and animals.
His wife, Dr Susan Laurance, is also a tropical biologist and is joining JCU as a senior lecturer.
“We’re greatly looking forward to being part of JCU’s continued growth and success in tropical ecology and conservation,” he said.
Professor Laurance was considering a number of offers to join other universities in Australia and overseas including Princeton University in the USA, and previously Cambridge University in the UK, before choosing James Cook University.
“It was a tough call, but I was tremendously impressed by JCU’s commitment to becoming an international force in tropical forest biology,” he said.
“The University has long been a world-leader in reef and marine research, and now the push is to develop a terrestrial program that’s equally dynamic.
“I see much prospect at JCU for international research and collaboration, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, which has some of the most imperilled forests in the world,” he said.
With five books and more than 300 scientific articles to his credit, Professor Laurance is a regular author in the world’s leading scientific journals.
This is not the first time he has chosen to work in Australia.
“As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, I spent two years doing fieldwork on the Atherton Tableland, where I studied the impacts of rainforest fragmentation on possums, tree-kangaroos, and other native mammal species,” he said.
He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the CSIRO Tropical Forest Research Centre at Atherton, and director of the S.F.S. Centre for Rainforest Studies at Yungaburra, north Queensland, before joining the Smithsonian Institution in 1996.
Professor Laurance has published many articles about his work in north Queensland including the book, “Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles: Confessions of a Rainforest Biologist,” which was a finalist for the 2000 Environmental Book of the Year Award.
A former president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, he was instrumental in not only turning it into the world’s largest scientific organisation devoted to tropical research, but also a major force in promoting forest conservation.
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Laurance has received a number of prestigious awards in recognition of his research and conservation activities, and earlier this year received the BBVA Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Biology Award.
The award includes a cash prize of 200,000 euros (about $350,000), and is sometimes referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize’ for conservation biology.