I am a Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, a member of Mark Westoby's Comparative Ecology Group , and an assistant-Convenor of the ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function. Through the Network we aim to stimulate research across disciplines such as functional genomics, ecophysiology, functional ecology, global change biology and evolutionary history. My personal research (funded by the Australian Research Council 2005-2009) focuses on quantifying how key plant traits vary with each other and with environmental factors, both in Australia and world-wide. Part of this work has been via "GloPNet" (Global Plant Trait Network), a collaborative project with Peter Reich (U. Minnesota) and others.

Other research interests include:

• Life-history variation in neotropical rainforests.
• Influence of seed size and seedling growth rate on inter-specific competition.
• Advances in the use of "model II" statistics for ecology (with David Warton, UNSW, and Daniel Falster, Macquarie University); (see the (S)MATR home page)
• Seed and seedling biology of Australian plants