After an honours degree in botany and a PhD in zoology from Monash University, I moved to UC Berkeley to study population dynamics in microtine rodents. I soon realized the error of my ways, and returned to Australia to study life history evolution and behavioural ecology of Antechinus, a bizarre group of marsupials that exhibit semelparity. All males plunge to their deaths immediately after mating. This not only requires special explanation, but also allows clear tests of otherwise intractable hypotheses, because the extreme simplicity of the life history throws several issues into sharp relief. After postdocs at Monash, CSIRO Wildlife & Ecology, and RSBS ANU, I got a real job in the Department of Zoology at ANU, which allowed me to pursue a growing interest in studies of lifetime reproductive performance in free-living animals. After studying antechinuses for almost a decade, I realised that I was not having nearly as much fun tramping through leech-infested rainforest, as one of my graduate students was having teasing apart the intricate sex lives of superb fairy-wrens in the croissant-infested Botanic Gardens in Canberra. I have worked on fairy-wrens for more than two decades, seeking an answer to the centrally important questions of the benefits that females obtain from discrimination among mates, the implications of those benefits for understanding the maintenance of genetic variation, and the evolution of the extraordinarily complex societies of cooperatively breeding birds. Along the way I was head of the School of Botany and Zoology for 13 years, Dean of Science for a year, and the Director of the ANU College of Medicine, Biology & Environment from June 2009 - April 2014.

Editorial Boards

• Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience
• PMC Biophysics
• Biophysical Review and Letters