Professor Stephen Simpson is the 2024 recipient of the Ralph Slatyer Medal. Stephen Simpson is Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre at Univ. Sydney and is the Executive Director of Obesity Australia. He has pioneered major developments at the interface of nutritional physiology, ecology, and behaviour. His groundbreaking discovery of the mechanisms that induce swarming in locusts (studies which span neuro-chemistry through to consequences for individual behaviour and population ecology) has immense practical and conceptual benefits. He has also developed a novel class of state-space models for nutrition. His Geometric Framework (GF) powerfully integrates ideas in this field and, although it arose from extensive experiments on insects, is now being applied in a wide variety of contexts, including the search for dietary causes of human obesity. He was awarded the AAS MacFarlane Burnet Medal in 2022 in recognition of his taxonomically broad and cross-disciplinary research on nutrition, including profound contributions to dietary causes of obesity and aging in humans.

Watch Professor Simpson's Seminar for the Ralph Slatyer Medal - Eat Like the Animals: what nature teaches us about the science of healthy eating.