Queensland Mycological Society  

"Fungal diversity in maritime Antarctic soils"

Dr Paul Dennis is a Lecturer in Soil and Environmental Science in UQ’s School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, where he also runs a research group focusing on microbial ecology.

Paul graduated from the University of Bangor in North Wales with a BSc Hons in Environmental Science in 2002. He then worked at Rothamsted Research, the world’s oldest agricultural research station, for a year on heavy metal contamination of soils. From 2003-2007 he did a PhD in the ecology of plant-microbe interactions at Rothamsted, University College London and London’s Natural History Museum. He then worked with the British Antarctic Survey, between 2007-2010, on the biodiversity of maritime Antarctic soils. During this period he visited Antarctica twice for a total of nine months. In 2010 he moved to Australia to join UQ’s Australian Center for Ecogenomics where he applied state-of-the-art sequencing technologies to the ecology of microorganisms in a range of environments. In 2013 he started his own lab in the School of Agriculture and Food Science and focuses on quantifying and reduces the impacts of agriculture on the environment and on understanding the impacts of environmental change on Earth’s microbial biodiversity.

For more about Paul, see: http://www.uq.edu.au/agriculture/pauldennis

There will be also be a report on the Collections and Descriptions Workshop that was held in October.