Sue Hand

Professor Sue Hand is a vertebrate palaeontologist researching the history of Australian mammals, continuing climate and environmental change in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, implications of that change for forest and island faunas, and the biodiversity, global relationships and evolutionary ecology of bats.

Her research interests are largely in the area of palaeontology, phylogenetics and biogeography, and specifically taxonomy, systematics, morphometrics, phylogenetics, biocorrelation, biogeography, palaeogeography, evolutionary biology and palaeoecology. Her area of special interest is fossil and modern bats, a major component of Australasia's living and fossil faunas, representing a quarter of Australian mammal species.

In these research areas, she has supervised/co-supervised 45 Honours, 3 Masters and 25 PhD students.

A key focus of the UNSW palaeontology group is the study of the fossil-rich Cenozoic faunas of the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in northwestern Queensland.

She has served on the Australian Research Council's Biological and Biotech Science Committee for ERA 2018, and ARC College of Experts 2019-2021