Professor Mark Burgman
Mark is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology. Previously, he was Director of the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) and Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment. He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning. He received a BSc from the University of New South Wales (1974), an MSc from Macquarie University, Sydney (1981), and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stonybrook (1987). He worked as a consultant ecologist and research scientist in Australia, the United States and Switzerland during the 1980s before joining the University of Melbourne in 1990. He joined CEP in February, 2017. He has published over two hundred and fifty refereed papers and book chapters and seven authored books. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.
As well as giving a keynote address on The quality of reasoning in the intelligence game, Mark will also be running a workshop on Uniting risk analyses and structured decision making at this year's conference. |
Dr Emily NicholsonEmily's research focuses on solving problems in nature conservation, including measuring change in biodiversity, predicting the impacts of change on species, ecosystems and the benefits they provide, and making conservation decisions. A key element of her work over the last decade has been a new framework for understanding, quantifying and predicting risks to ecosystems, the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, with impacts at global and national levels. The approach was adopted in 2014 as the global standard by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s biggest environmental organisation, and by governments, researchers and NGOs worldwide. Last year, it also became the common assessment framework for Australian state and federal governments, and thus will have direct impacts on Australian environmental legislation. The Red List team was awarded an Australian Museum Eureka Prize in 2015 for their work. Before joining Deakin University in 2015, Emily was a Centenary Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne (2012-2015), a Marie Curie Fellow at Imperial College London (2007-2012), and a postdoc at Princeton University (2006-2007).
Emily will give a keynote address on Assessing risks to biodiversity in a changing world at this year's conference. |
Dr Bruce MarcotBruce is a research wildlife biologist with the Ecosystem Process and Function Research Program of U.S. Forest Service in Portland, Oregon, USA. He participates in applied science research and technology application projects dealing with old-forest management, specifically on analysis of rare and little-known species, assessment of biodiversity, and research in regions from the arctic to the tropics. He has provided advances in integrating Bayesian network modelling with decision science, expert elicitation, rare event statistics, and monitoring. He received a B.S. in Natural Resources Planning and an M.S. in Wildlife Management at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and a Ph.D. in Wildlife Science at Oregon State University. Other interests include classical music composition, photography, poetry, traveling and camping, and linguistics.
At this year's conference, Bruce will give a keynote address on Crafting Bayesian networks from expert knowledge. |