Laurance wins Australian Laureate Fellowship
July 12, 2010
The Fellowship supports excellence in research by attracting world-class researchers and research leaders to key positions, and creating new incentives for the application of their talents in Australia
STRI´s research associate William F. Laurance is one of 15 scientists to receive the prestigious 2010 Australian Laureate Fellowship, a $1.6 million award from Australia which will advance Laurance's environmental research program in tropical forests in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America.
The Fellowship supports excellence in research by attracting world-class researchers and research leaders to key positions, and creating new incentives for the application of their talents in Australia. Six months ago, Bill and Susan Laurance moved from Panama to Australia, where both accepted permanent professorships at James Cook University.
One of the goals of the Fellowship is to foster international collaborations. To this end, Laurance plans to continue working actively with colleagues at STRI, “especially in the Amazon, where I help to lead the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP, co-managed by STRI and Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research."
Laurance was one of the first biologists to sound the alarm that frogs and other amphibians were suffering serious declines from an unknown pathogen—later attributed to a lethal fungal disease that has now decimated nearly 200 species worldwide.
A fellow of the AAAS, Laurance won in the prestigious BBVA Frontiers of Ecology and Conservation Biology Award with Thomas Lovejoy in 2008. He also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation, intended to foster high-profile collaborations with European scientists.
Adapted from Beth King
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