One of the things that I really enjoy about my work is telling people about it! I mean, who doesn’t love a good yarn about an Ice Age cold case featuring some of the coolest, biggest and meanest beasts that ever walked the planet! It’s an easy sell too- most people know a little about dinosaurs, but when you tell them that there were giant wombats, massive kangaroos, and marsupial lions living alongside Australia’s earliest peoples… well, their jaws just drop!

I was recently invited to attend the awards ceremony of the Queensland Young Tall Poppies. The awards are an initiative of the Australian Institute of Policy and Science, or AIPS. Each year, AIPS celebrates and recognises the achievements of young scientists across Australia as part of their Tall Poppy Campaign. Their ultimate aim is to strive towards the building of more engaged scientific leadership across Australia, and that by necessity, means scientific communication, not just between scientists, but with the general public alike.

Discussing my research at the 2013 Queensland Tall Poppy Awards (it’s not often that you’ll find me this clean and wearing a suit!)

The awards are made on a state-by-state basis and recognise the achievements of outstanding young researchers across a huge variety of scientific fields including medical research, technology, engineering and mathematics. I’m pleased to say that my name was among the list of 11 awardees for the 2013 Queensland Young Tall Poppies. It was a real thrill and surprise for me. The award ceremony was held at the Queensland University of Technology’s Science and Engineering Centre in mid-November (a really impressive place that you should check out next time you are in Brisbane City!), hosted by Queensland’s Chief Scientist, Dr Geoff Garrett, with the individual awards presented by the Queensland Minister for Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts, Mr Ian Walker.

Out of the 11 awardees, one was chosen to become the Young Queensland Tall Poppy of the Year. The 2013 candidates are an incredible bunch of young scientists and include researchers working in a variety of different areas from molecular biology, public health, neuropharmacology, tissue engineering and more. I was really blown away to hear about their research- they’re doing some massively impressive things. But what surprised, and humbled me more than anything, was when I heard my name read out for the top prize! I really couldn’t believe it!

My boss, Professor Gregg Webb, was in the audience- he was super pumped, perhaps even more than I was! It’s a great opportunity, not just for me, but for my research group to really start showing off some of the cool palaeo-type things that we do. Although I tend to talk up my megafauna research much more than anything, the real crux of what I do really goes far beyond those Ice Age megabeasts. Yep, it would be awesome if we could figure out why diprotodon and co suffered extinction, but wouldn’t it be brilliant to know how the species that we still have around us today staved off extinction? How did they respond to the massive climatic changes and anthropogenic impacts that have gripped Australia since the last Ice Age? How were they able to adapt at a time when a huge variety of different creatures were dropping off the evolutionary family tree?

Receiving the 2013 Tall Poppy Award from the Honorable Mr Ian Walker

So that is the ultimate research question- how have modern floras, faunas and ecosystems responded to past episodes of climate change and environmental peturbation? And critically, what can we do with that knowledge? The past is what informs that present, and it can also help us understand where we might be heading in the future. That’s an insight that can only be provided by the fossil record and is especially important at this time of widespread apprehension over the potentially devastating impacts of future anthropogenic climate change. There are a lot of lessons that we can learn about the past, with great potential for applying that to modern conservation approaches and ecosystem management.

I’m looking forward to the opportunities that the Young Tall Poppy award will bring me over 2014. It’ll be a great chance to spread the fossil-word to one and all, and hopefully attract a bit more community support for the palaeo-sciences, not just in Queensland, but across Australia more broadly.