Meet the Australia Faculty
Faculty in Residence
Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP program locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. More information will be provided via email to future cohorts.
Local Faculty
Associate Professor Ian Tibbetts (Individual Research Project Course Coordinator)
A marine biologist by trade, Ian is the founding Director of the International Programs Unit at the University of Queensland and oversees the direction of the Stanford Australia Program. Ian has considerable experience in program development and enjoys engaging with students in field research activities and following the development of their careers. With an extensive marine science background, Ian has published in diverse fields reflecting his general curiosity about marine life and in particular, the dynamic between evolution and action, addressing challenges to extant paradigms that his extensive field research has prompted. Ian coordinates the Independent Research Projects.
Dr. Nicola Browne (Coastal Reef Ecosystems Course Coordinator)
Nicola Browne obtained her PhD from James Cook University in Marine Sciences in 2011. Shortly afterwards, she moved to Singapore for a 2-year postdoctoral position investigating the impact of ship-wake induced sediment resuspension on coral reefs and sea grass communities. On return to Australia in 2014, Nicola took up a teaching-focused position in Experimental Biology at Curtin University in Western Australia (WA) before she was awarded an ARC DECRA in 2018.
Nicola’s research focuses on carbonate budgets on coral reefs as well as reef-associated island stability. This involves the quantification of all biological sources of carbonate (corals, calcareous algae, foraminifera etc.) as well as estimating rates of carbonate loss through physical, chemical and biological erosion. The ARC DECRA focused on the development of a dynamic data-driven model to predict reef island resilience to tropical cyclones and rising sea level. This involved the application of carbonate budgets as well as palaeoecology, sedimentology, oceanography and geomorphology. She has also worked on turbid reefs on the Great Barrier Reef, Pilbara WA, Borneo, Madagascar and Singapore investigating increased resilience of turbid water corals to rising sea surface temperatures using various measures of coral physiology and growth.
In the School of Biological Sciences, Nicola is the Coral Reef Ecosystems co-ordinator for the Stanford BOSP Australian Coastal Studies International Program as well as the course co-ordinator for Masters in Conservation Biology.
Associate Professor Chris Roelfsema (Coastal Reef Ecosystems Course Coordinator)
Chris Roelfsema has been working over 25 years in coral and seagrass environments in Australia and overseas and is now an Associate Professor at the School of The Environment, University of Queensland and Academic Director of Heron Island Research Station. His research interests focus on developing and implementing cost effective mapping and monitoring approaches for coral reefs and seagrass habitats through, integration field and/or remote sensing image datasets, citizen science at local to global scales. Image sources include underwater photo quadrats and 3D photogrammetry and drones, planes and/or satellites. He teaches university courses, capacity building workshops and supervises several masters and PhD students.
Past and present projects include leading: 20 yr+ annual monitoring for corals on Heron Reef, Great Barrier Reef, 20 yr+ monitoring of seagrass habitats in Moreton Bay, development of hyperspectral mapping capability, developing habits maps for all of the Great Barrier Reef and for the global habitat mapping as part of the Allen Coral Atlas. Additionally he is a strong advocate, trainer and advisor for citizen science programs, such as: Coral Watch, Reef Check and Great Reef Census.
He has a PhD in Coral Reef and Seagrass Remote Sensing, PgDip in Marine Science 1999, Ms in Geodesy 1993, BsC in Hydrography 1986. Chris is a underwater photographer, scuba diving instructor, loves traveling and dived on reefs globally and lived in Holland, Scotland, Jamaica, Malaysia, Fiji and Australia.
Dr. Natalie Jones (Australian Studies Course Coordinator)
Natalie is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is an applied anthropologist that is dedicated to advancing the role of social science in natural resource management within interdisciplinary teams. Her research interests involve understanding how people perceive and interact with environmental systems.
Natalie has established a strong track record in applying cognitive constructs, including mental models and values, to explore how people make sense of and relate to their environment, particularly in relation to water resources. Natalie has an interest in designing and implementing participatory processes to support decision-making. She is currently leading the social component of an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research in Fiji which aims to develop a value chain for converting senile coconut trees into engineered wood products.
Natalie has conducted applied social science research within a number of interdisciplinary teams involving governments, research organisations, non-governmental organisations and Indigenous groups. She has published more than 30 academic papers and book chapters.
Prior to taking up her position at the University of Queensland, Natalie was a Researcher at the Australian National University working in the Resource Management of the Asia Pacific Program. This involved working as a social scientist in an international collaboration with CIRAD – Agricultural Research for Development, to evaluate 34 participatory modelling projects globally. She has undertaken and been involved in consultancies with various natural resource management groups within Australia, including Healthy Land and Water, Seqwater, One Basin CRC and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
Dr Tobias Smith (Terrestrial Ecology and Conservation Course Coordinator)
Tobias (Toby) is the coordinator for the Terrestrial Ecology course taught on K’gari/Fraser Island and at Lamington National Park. Toby is a passionate ecologist and educator, having completed his PhD on tropical bees at the University of Queensland, undertaking research in both Northern Australia and Central America. Toby’s research mostly focuses on one particularly fascinating group of bees, the stingless honeybees, found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Toby has a passion for bee-related teaching and science communication, running bee workshops for Schools and Universities, and has published a series of user-friendly taxonomic keys to make Australian bee identification more accessible to non-experts.
Dr. Ekaterina (Katya) Ovsyanikova (Coastal Ecosystems Course Coordinator)
Katya is a marine biologist with over 15 years of worldwide experience in marine mammal and coastal ecology. Katya worked in the North Pacific studying population abundance and feeding ecology of sea otters and distribution of cetaceans along the Pacific coastline of Russia. She worked as a marine biology lecturer onboard expedition ships between 2010 and 2017 in the Arctic and the Antarctic, sailing the world’s oceans and recording marine mammal observations alongside lecturing and guiding activities.
Katya completed her Master of Antarctic Studies Degree at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 2015 researching ecology and movement patterns of Antarctic killer whales. Since 2016 she has been living and working in Australia. Katya completed her PhD at the University of Queensland studying acoustic communication of bottlenose dolphins in Moreton Bay, followed by a short postdoc at the Queensland University of Technology focussed on koala distribution and abundance. She also worked in a multi-year citizen science benthic monitoring project with Science Under Sail Australia looking at distribution and changes in seagrass in Moreton Bay and along the Great Barrier Reef coast. Katya is passionate about sharing her knowledge of marine environments through science communication and teaching and has been involved in teaching activities at UQ and the Moreton Bay Research Station since 2018.