Professor Hugh Possingham ARC Federation Fellow ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions School of Mathematics and Physics The University of Queensland Biography: Hugh’s PhD was in biomathematics at Oxford University funded by a Rhodes scholarship. Following postdocs at Stanford and ANU, Hugh was as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at The University of Adelaide in 1990. After that he drifted to the dark side – ecology and conservation – becoming the Foundation Professor and Chair of Environmental Science at The University of Adelaide. In 2000 he moved to a Professorship at The University of Queensland jointly between mathematics and biology. In 2001 Hugh was awarded an Australian Mathematics Society medal for a mathematician under the age of 40. http://www.austms.org.au/The+Australian+Mathematical+Society+Medal Hugh has co‐authored over 353 refereed publications covered by the Web of Science (24 in Science, Nature or PNAS) and has 10,000 Web of Science citations. He currently directs two research centres and has supervised (or is supervising) 53 PhD students and 42 postdoctoral fellows. The Possingham group have developed the most widely used conservation planning software in the world. Marxan www.ecology.uq.edu.au/marxan.htm was used to underpin the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef, and is currently used in over 100 countries by over 3,000 users from the UK and USA to Madagascar and Brazil – to build the world’s marine and terrestrial landscape plans. Most recently Marxan was used to develop the biggest marine reserve system in the world – Australia’s federal marine reserve system. Hugh coauthored two scientific consensus statements that lead to Australia’s marine reserve system. Many governments and ENGOs use his lab’s work for the allocation of funding to threatened species recovery and solving other conservation conundrums. .