Professor Simon Haberle

Simon is currently the Director of the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific and has held this role since 2016. He completed his PhD at ANU on the Late Quaternary Environmental History of the Tari Basin, Papua New Guinea, in 1994. While holding postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian (STRI, Panama) and at the University of Cambridge he continued to pursue his interest in the role of past climate change and human activity on tropical and temperate ecosystems through work in the Amazon Basin and southern South America. He was awarded an ARC QEII Fellowship and Logan Fellowship at Monash University to continue his focuses on the application of high-resolution palaeoecological analysis to our understanding of the impact of climate variability (ENSO) and human activity on terrestrial ecosystems of Australia, the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the Holocene. He works extensively with and for Indigenous communities throughout the region to carry out collaborative in-country research and training projects. He is also developing e-Research tools and citizen science projects in palaeoecology and aerobiology, such as the Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas, CanberraPollen, AirRater and the PalaeoWorks websites. He is currently using his knowledge of Australian pollen to explore the impact of pollution and atmospheric pollen and spores on respiratory health.