I am always happy to hear from students & researchers at all levels; from potential PhD’s to undergraduates looking for hands-on experience. I am open to any ideas that even vaguely align with the lab’s interests, or have various pre-built projects available (such as those sketched below). Feel free to take a look at some of our work and send me an email!

Pathways

Aside from the occasional funded position, there are numerous routes to securing funding for honours, PhD’s, and postdocs. A few are listed below, and I will gladly do all I can to help qualified applicants attain support.

PhD and Masters: Students will need to secure a scholarship such as an RTP or the University’s equivalent (which share an application), with application rounds twice per year.

Honours: Honours is an extra year of study following, or as part of, an undergraduate degree, and involves a substantial independent research component. Students both internal and external to USyd are able to apply, and it’s an excellent opportunity to gain significant research experience.

Undergraduates: I have projects available for students interested in gaining some hand-on experience, and prefer to collaborate on substantial self-contained projects with a view to publication. Volunteers are welcome, though people should be paid for their work whenever possible, and summer research scholarships are available to second- and third-year undergraduate to that end. They’re competitively awarded to students from any domestic (Aus or NZ) university, include a modest stipend for the six week duration, and applications typically close in September.

Projects

Work is ongoing, and enquiries are particularly welcome, in the following general areas:

Do insects and other invertebrates feel pain?

Sentience extends well beyond humans, but which animals possess this capacity for felt experience and what form it takes is unresolved. This work will entail (gentle) behavioural tests, evidence synthesis, and/or theoretical investigations of whether representative invertebrates can feel pain, with the answers holding significant ethical, welfare, and scientific implications.

Resilience and recovery in pollination systems

In particular, we are seeking a highly motivated PhD candidate to join a new ARC-funded project exploring the resilience of alpine pollination systems under environmental change. This PhD will focus on the often-overlooked role of nocturnal insect pollinators in threatened alpine ecosystems, using field surveys, network ecology, and ecological modelling to characterise day–night pollination dynamics.

The project is part of the Discovery Project “The dark side: weaving nocturnality into pollination resilience networks”, and will involve both significant fieldwork in Kosciuszko National Park and lab-based and computational analysis at the University of Sydney.