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Associate Professor, University of Tasmania

Associate Professor Greg Jordan is a highly active researcher and teacher in the School of Biological Sciences in the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology. His research explores the evolution of plants over the last 100 million years, with a particular focus on the responses to climate change. His work also closely considers how we can use fossil evidence to work out what past climate and ecosystems were like. He has published over 120 papers in international journals and a number of book chapters. A career highlight was a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard in 2005, which provides support for outstanding mid-career researchers.

Greg Jordan has been a teaching/research academic at the University of Tasmania since 2000. Prior to that he was a research fellow in the period following the completion of his PhD at University of Tasmania in 1993. This period included an ARC postdoctoral research fellowship.

His experience as lead investigator on three ARC Discovery Projects and two ARC Linkage Projects has involved managing large projects with multiple staff and students.

Greg's work is intimately related to the theme of Environment, Resources and Sustainability. He is mainly interested in the evolution of vegetation and plant species, and works at both global and local levels. He combines different kinds of evidence - fossils, evolutionary trees based on DNA and the distribution and physiology of living species. Some important are: the remarkable things that comparing the structure of fossil and living leaves can tell us about how our vegetation and flora evolved; the importance of extinction in understanding evolution; and what the modern distribution of species tells us about their history. His work focusses mainly on the fabulous southern hemisphere family Proteaceae (banksias, proteas, grevilleas and many others) and on the global distribution of conifers (and what controls this). This work has very important implications because it is critical for understanding how species and ecosystems will respond to current environmental change.

He also works on forest ecology, looking at the impact of disturbance on biodiversity. This is closely linked to sustainable forest management.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor, University of Tasmania