Scientific honour for assisted evolution pioneer
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Ecological geneticist and assisted evolution pioneer Professor Madeleine van Oppen from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Melbourne will this week be inducted as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra.
Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science are among the nation’s most distinguished scientists and are elected by their peers. Professor van Oppen will receive the Fellowship and deliver a presentation on her work at a ceremony during the Science at the Shine Dome event on Tuesday 10 September.
Professor van Oppen has spent 23 years at AIMS. Initially she focused on deciphering the mechanisms that corals have to cope with environmental change. Later, she began harnessing those mechanisms to enhance the resilience of corals under climate change. Speeding up the rate of naturally occurring evolutionary processes became known as assisted evolution.
Her research, widely used at AIMS, has become crucial for coral reef restoration research in Australia and across the world
In her time at AIMS, Professor van Oppen said highlights had included meeting British broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough when he visited the Townsville headquarters for his documentary on the Great Barrier Reef. Another stand out achievement had been winning the Paul Allen Ocean Challenge Award in 2013, she said.
“The Paul Allen Award came with an invitation to submit a funding proposal which was successful. It represented the first major grant in that space. Prior to that I had received some seed funding from the Great Barrier Reef Foundation for the assisted evolution work, although we hadn't coined that term then,” said Professor van Oppen
“Other highlights were the fieldtrips I made earlier during my AIMS time. We spent quite a bit of time collecting small coral fragments for genetic analysis and got to see many amazing reefs.”
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