I spent two and a half years at ANU working with some really wonderful people. We kicked off a really cool pollen monitoring project, VegeMap, that I believe and hope has the momentum to continue without me.

But I’m really excited to start a new role at Flinders University. I’ve joined the Global Ecology Laboratory | Partuyarta Ngadluku Wardli Kuu under the tutelage of Prof Corey Bradshaw. I’m excited to be stepping squarely into the world of modelling. It feels like a departure, but I will still be focused on palaeoecology and palaeoenvironments.

Another change will be refocussing to much more recent time, from 1000 years ago to the future! The job is part of CIEHF, the ARC’s Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. It’s really encouraging to see the ARC supporting Indigenous-led research on Country. This necessarily means that my project is very nebulous to start with; CIEHF projects are explicitly co-designed with Traditional Owners and researchers to incorporate multiple ways of knowing. It feels both counterintuitive and exciting to refrain from defining my own research questions and reimagine myself as an instrument for bigger questions built from a Venn diagram of Indigenous and scientific communities.

My interest in Earth systems is founded in my love and appreciation for our planet. I’ve always hoped that my work would contribute to understanding and conserving the natural world. This new role feels like a big step towards having a direct impact on actual conservation efforts done the right way. Let’s go!

It’s official