Geoffrey McFadden

Geoff McFadden is a Professor at the School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne.
Geoff identified the relict chloroplast in malaria parasites and is unravelling what the relict chloroplast does and how it can be targeted with antimalarial drugs. He has published 219 papers, many in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, EMBO J, Current Biol and PNAS. He has 41 papers with more than 100 citations, 15,700 career citations, and an h-index of 63.

He took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Melbourne. He made two trips to Antarctica to study sea ice algae while completing a PhD in the Botany School, University of Melbourne in 1984. He then took up a three year postdoctoral position in algal cell biology in Muenster, Germany. Geoff returned to Australia on a prestigious QEII Fellowship in 1987 to join Prof Adrienne Clarke’s Plant Cell Biology Research Centre, where he worked on the molecular biology of barley and tobacco. He subsequently received an ARC Senior Research Fellowship then a Professorial Research Fellowship to investigate the origin of chloroplasts by endosymbiosis followed by a Federation Fellowship to study malaria. In 1995 Geoff spent a year at the Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Canada.

Geoff has been awarded the Goldacre Medal, the Australian Academy of Science's Frederick White Prize, two Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar’s awards, The David Syme Medal, the Woodward Medal for excellence in Science & Technology, the Julian Wells Medal, the Miescher-Ishida Prize, the Royal Society of Victoria Medal, The Ramaciotti Medal, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.