People
Lab head: Professor Michael Kearney
Mike is a physiological ecologist in the School of BioSciences at The University of Melbourne. A childhood passion of looking for animals in the bush led him to wonder how they manage to survive in some places and not others, and hence to become an ecologist. His research is focused on ways to connect what we can measure about an organism’s basic survival skills and capabilities with what we can measure about their environments and how they change though space and time. From a theoretical point of view, this has led him to work in the fields of microclimate modelling, biophysical ecology and metabolic theory. He also has interests in the evolution of parthenogenetic organisms, palaeo-environments, life history and biogeography. Taxonomically his expertise is with reptiles and grasshoppers but he enjoys studying all kinds of organisms, including plants.
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