Tropical leaders
Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Distinguished Professor William Laurance
Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Tropical Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics)
(07) 40421117
Sasha.Aikhenvald@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald is an expert on languages and cultures of Amazonia and the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. She worked in the Middle East section of the Department of Languages in the Institute of Oriental Studies (of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR) in Moscow, and was then Professor of Linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil before coming to Australia in 1994.
In 2008 she was elected Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America (there are only about 40 Honorary spread over 25 countries, Aikhenvald being the only LSA Honorary member currently employed by an Australian university). In 1999, she was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Current interests include languages, cultures and societies of Amazonia and New Guinea, language revitalization and maintenance, and the interaction between language and culture across the tropical regions of the world. She is CI on two ARC-funded Discovery Projects and one ARC-funded Linkage Project. Jointly with Professor R. M. W. Dixon, she is Co-ordinator of the Ethno linguistics Research Unit within the Cairns Institute.
Professor Ian Atkinson
Director, eResearch Centre
(07) 4781 6921
ian.atkinson@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Ian Atkinson has a background in computational chemistry that led him to the world of Supercomputing. More recently he has been engaged in e-Research and grid computing service development focused on serving the Australian research community. He has a long-standing interest in eResearch methods, tools, scientific data management and user interfaces for HPC tools. Current interests are grid mediated access to data sources. He is a CI on the DEST Archer eResearch project focussing on data grids and data collection from instruments and sensors. He holds joint appointments as the Manager of High Performance Computing within Information Technology and Resources at JCU and also a facility member of the School of Maths, Physics and IT at JCU.
Distinguished Professor William Laurance
Tropical Leader (Rainforest)
bill.laurance@jcu.edu.au
Biography
William Laurance is a leading conservation biologist who has worked internationally on numerous high-profile threats to tropical forests—in the Amazon, Central America, Africa, and Australasia. A highly prolific scientist, to date he has published five books and over 300 scientific articles. Laurance joins JCU from the U.S. Smithsonian Institution, where he was Senior Staff Scientist. His wife, Dr Susan Laurance, will also be joining the JCU faculty. Both will be based at the JCU-Cairns campus. Laurance received his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, and then was a postdoctoral fellow with the CSIRO Tropical Forest Research Centre and director of the SFS Centre for Rainforest Studies in north Queensland, before joining the Smithsonian in 1996. His interests are diverse, ranging from the impacts of habitat fragmentation, logging and fires on tropical fauna and flora, to global-change science and conservation policy. He is also actively engaged in public-outreach initiatives and the popular media. Laurance is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2008 received the prestigious BBVA Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Biology Award, among other professional achievements. He is also a research fellow at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.
Dr Susan Laurance
Tropical Leader (Rainforest Ecology)
susan.laurance@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Susan Laurance is a landscape ecologist interested in the spatial patterns of species and communities across natural and human-disturbed landscapes. Her research focuses on both ecological processes and traits of individual species, in order to understand which species are vulnerable to extinction in disturbed environments. She has studied the effects of habitat fragmentation, wildlife corridors, roads, logging and climate change on plant and wildlife communities in a variety of tropical environments. Susan began her career in Australian rainforests but has lived and worked for the last 14 years in Brazil, Panama, and Mauritius. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research, and a current member of the executive council of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Her work will focus on land-use and climate change in tropical Australia, the Amazon, and possibly elsewhere in the tropics.
Professor Alex Loukas
Tropical Biosecurity
alex.loukas@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Alex Loukas is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Parasitology. He received his PhD from University of Queensland in 1995 and has since worked at The University of Edinburgh, George Washington University and Queensland Institute of Medical Research. His major research interest is the molecular basis of host-parasite interactions, with a particular focus on characterising the functions of proteins secreted by helminths (worms) that parasitise humans in developing countries. Research projects include: (1) development of vaccines for human hookworm disease and schistosomiasis; (2) molecular pathogenesis of infection with the carcinogenic liver fluke; (3) characterising the secretomes of parasitic helminths using proteomics; (4) human helminths as therapies for autoimmune and allergic diseases. His research is supported by international and national funding bodies including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NHMRC (program and project grants) and NIH. He is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed publications and has received numerous awards for his research.
Professor Ton Otto
Tropical Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics)
Ton.otto@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Ton Otto has read philosophy, history and anthropology in the Netherlands and has a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University, based on field research in Manus, Papua New Guinea. He has sustained his original interest in processes of social and cultural change throughout his career and has written extensively about religious change, cargo cults, political transformation, warfare, the politics of tradition and identity, and the management of natural resources, with a regional focus on Melanesia. He also writes about methodological and epistemological issues and engages with material and visual culture through exhibitions and films. At present he deals in particular with questions of local agency in relation to constructions of time, temporality and change, and the development of participatory research methods in the study of these questions.
After appointments in Australia and The Netherlands (among others a prestigious Research Fellowship with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) he was appointed Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1996. He has extensive experience with research organisation, PhD training and research leadership, as Founding Manager of the Centre for Pacific and Asian Studies, Nijmegen, and initiator of the European Society of Oceanists (1991-94), Head of a large Institute at the University of Aarhus (Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics 2001-2006) and Head of the Danish Research School in Anthropology and Ethnography (2004-2008), which is the main forum for PhD training in Denmark.
Professor Komla Tsey
Tropical Leader (Education for Social Sustainability)
(07) 4042 1257
komla.tsey@jcu.edu.au
Biography
Komla Tsey is a social science researcher with extensive experience in community development, empowerment and related participatory and social inclusion research that spans three decades in Ghana and Australia. He worked at Menzies School of Health Research as Head of the Central Australian Unit in Alice Springs and as one of 5 inaugural Program Leaders for the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health Research. Since 2001, Komla has been the Program Leader for 10-year program of empowerment research involving James Cook University, the University of Queensland and over a dozen community organisations and other government agencies. Current interests include sustainable development; education; empowerment; knowledge systems; social equity; social determinants of health and wellbeing; research partnerships; and evidence base policy and practice. He is currently CI on 5 NHMRC project grants and one Capacity Building grant.
Professor Chris Cunneen
Tropical leader in Justice and Social Inclusion
Commencing end of March 2010
Biography
Chris Cunneen is a leading Australian and international criminologist. Prior to commencing at JCU he held the NewSouth Global Chair in Criminology at the University of New South Wales from 2006-2010. Previously, Professor Cunneen taught criminology at the University of Sydney Law School from 1990-2005. He was Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney from 1999-2005.
Professor Cunneen has conducted research for a number of Indigenous and human rights organisations, including the Australian Human Rights Commission. He was a consultant to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. He has also worked widely with government agencies and law reform bodies on issues relating to juvenile justice, policing and corrections. He is currently a chief investigator on a large ARC Discovery grant titled the Australian Prison Project. He has published a number of books and is a member of the editorial board of a number of leading international journals.
Professor Bob Stevenson
Tropical leader - Education for Environmental Sustainability
Commencing February 2010
Biography
Bob Stevenson’s research has focused on theory-policy-practice relationships in environmental/sustainability education and its history and marginalized status as an educational reform in K-12 schooling.
Before moving to the United States in 1983 to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in curriculum theory and research, he was an environmental education curriculum specialist in Education Queensland. Prior to his appointment at JCU, his previous academic career was at the University at Buffalo, New York where he served as Head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy and Co-Director of the Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative Research Network.
He is a co-executive editor of the Journal of Environmental Education, the oldest journal in the field, and has served on the editorial boards of all five of the major English language journals in environmental education around the world. Among his co-edited books are “Engaging environmental education: Learning, culture and agency” (Sense, in press) and “Education and sustainability: Responding to the global challenge” (IUCN, 2002). He is also currently a co-editor of the first International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education to be published by the American Educational Research Association.