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Professor Michael Bird

Federation Fellowship winner 2008

Project : Environmental change, carbon cycling and human impact in tropical Australia .

Current institution : University of St. Andrews ( UK ).

Host institution : James Cook University .

Primary research field : Biological Sciences.

Professor Bird holds the Chair in Environmental Change in the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews in the UK . He is recognised internationally as an expert in environmental geochemistry and terrestrial carbon cycle science.

Professor Bird plans to develop an integrated process-based understanding of the interactions between biogeochemical cycling, climate change and human activities in the tropics on a range of time scales.

His research will assist to: predict the response of tropical ecosystems to future environmental changes; develop effective methodologies for improved carbon sequestration, verifiable carbon accounting and emissions trading; and achieve sustainability in the use of natural resources.

Professor Bird obtained his PhD in earth sciences at The Australian National University (ANU), completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario in Canada , and then returned to the ANU in 1990. In 2000, he became an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore , before moving to his current position in 2004.

Professor Bird is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has been awarded an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship and a visiting fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany .