Professor Mark Adams

Biography

Mark's long-term focus is the biology and ecology of Australia’s forests, woodlands and rangelands. His work has been recognized with Fellowships and Awards in Australia, Germany, France and New Zealand, over more than three decades. He has supervised to successful completion more than 40 PhD students, and has raised in excess of $20M of nationally competitive, Category 1 funding. His published output has attracted more than 7500 citations (SCOPUS H index of 46) for research with a distinctly Australian flavour.

Instrumental in building major research centres and institutes across three states and five universities, Mark has a deep understanding of the Australian higher education system. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Environment at USYD for more than seven years, and as Director of the Centre for Carbon Water and Food (CCWF) for three. In these capacities, he led the building of the International Grains Research Centre at Narrabri, NSW, and the CCWF at Camden, NSW.

Mark has led a strong research program for the past 30 years. He was the lead scientist in the creation of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (Bushfire CRC) and served for five years as a Program Leader. He served for six years as a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (Nairobi, Kenya), and for a further two years in the same capacity at the Centre for International Forestry Research (Bogor, Indonesia). For two years he was a member of the Board of the Bushfire CRC.

His expertise is broadly summarised under the headings of ecology of plants and soils, but he has published across fields as diverse as hydrology, soil science, plant physiology, disturbance ecology, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry and others. He has a strong passion for originality and innovation. He has played significant roles in leading the development of novel methods and techniques suited to quantifying fluxes of carbon, water and nutrients. Currently he is working with colleagues in Europe and the USA on major issues such as the water use efficiency of trees, forests, plantations and crops.