Professor Andersen a Professorial Fellow at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University. Prior to this, he was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Land & Water Flagship, and Officer-in-Charge of CSIRO’s Tropical Ecosystems Research Centre in Darwin for 16 years.
Professor Andersen is internationally recognised as the leading ant community ecologist in the world. He has pioneered the use of groups of functionally similar species to gain a predictive understanding of responses of ant communities to environmental stress and disturbance. Professor Andersen has applied this to using ants as bio-indicators in land management, and is an international leader in the use of invertebrates in environmental assessment and monitoring. He also played a key leadership role in CSIRO’s research on savanna burning, which addressed the biophysical, economic, policy and anthropological issues relating to savanna fire management for Greenhouse gas abatement, especially on Aboriginal lands.
Professor Andersen and was an inaugural member of the NT Research and Innovation Board and received the 2000 Far East Economic Review Asian Innovation Award. In 2009 he was awarded the Charles Darwin Medal for Research and Innovation in the NT for his contributions to science and science leadership. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Science.
[September 2019]