Richard Hobbs

Richard J. Hobbs FAA, is a distinguished professor, ARC Australian Laureate Fellow and ecologist at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Highly-Cited author who has written extensively in the areas of vegetation dynamics and management, ecosystem fragmentation, ecosystem rehabilitation and restoration, landscape ecology, and conservation biology. Current research focuses on managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.
Academic career.
An alumnus of Edinburgh University, Scotland, Richard obtained a 1st class honours in Ecological Science in 1976. He secured a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of California Santa Barbara, USA where he completed a master's degree in 1977. He completed his PhD at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland in 1982, working on post-fire dynamics of heathland communities, supervised by Prof Charles Gimingham.
His first postdoctoral research position was at Stanford University, working with Prof Hal Mooney on serpentine grassland dynamics.
In 1984 he joined the CSIRO Division of Wildlife & Ecology in Western Australia and worked on the dynamics of fragmented ecosystems in the Western Australian wheatbelt, becoming the Officer in Charge of the Western Australian laboratory in 1997.
In 2000 he took up a Chair in Environmental Science at Murdoch University and was awarded an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship in 2006.
Moving to the University of Western Australia in 2009, he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council for research into "Intervention ecology: managing ecosystems in the 21st century".