Prof. Peter Harrison is the Director of the SCU Whale Research Centre and Director of Marine Studies at Southern Cross University. Peter is also the Director of the SCU Coral Reef Research Centre, the appointed marine expert on the Australian Government's Threatened Species Scientific Committee, a member of the National Marine Science Centre Board, a member of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management (Oceania), a member of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, and the Patron of the Banyan Tree Marine Laboratory in the Maldives, central Indian Ocean.

Peter has been actively researching and teaching aspects of marine science for 29 years and has been awarded $3.7 million in research grants and consultancies. He has published more than 100 scientific research papers, books, invited major review chapters and major reports, which have been cited more than 2,100 times. Peter is passionate about marine science and its application to marine conservation and management, and has been awarded multiple prizes for research and University teaching including a joint award of a Eureka Prize for Environmental Research. He has successfully supervised 28 Postgraduate and Honours students (including multiple University Medallists for outstanding theses), with 17 current PhD and MSc Postgraduate and Honours students on marine science topics ranging from coral reef ecology and management to whale and dolphin ecology and conservation.

Peter was appointed as the Director of the SCU Whale Research Centre in 2002 and since that time has led the development of the Centre, which now supports the largest group of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers on whales and dolphins in Australia. Peter is the Project manager for the ARC Linkage grant on Telomere ageing of humpback whales, and co-ordinates the revolutionary new Fluke Matcher collaborative research project enabling efficient computer based matching of humpback whale flukes (Australian Marine Mammal Centre grant). Peter's most recently completed major cetacean research project was the 'Global Conservation Status of Cetaceans Review' (Harrison et al. 2009: 125 pages), funded by Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Peter was the co-organiser and host for the DEH National Cetacean Research Partnerships Workshop in 2004, co-host and facilitator for the Australian Humpback Whale Photo-identification workshop, and co-hosted the Annual meeting of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium at Byron Bay in 2004.

Much of Peter's research has focussed on coral reef ecology, and he was a founding member of the coral research team at James Cook University that discovered the mass coral spawning phenomenon on the Great Barrier Reef (Harrison et al. 1984, Science, 223: 1186-1189). His major current research interests include: telomere ageing of humpback whales, global patterns of coral reproduction, supervising whale and dolphin ecology and conservation projects, impacts of pollution and stress on corals and reefs, coral reef ecology and reef rehabilitation, and long-term monitoring of marine communities. Peter's research has focused on the Great Barrier Reef and subtropical reefs in eastern Australia, with additional research in Japan, Micronesia, French Polynesia, the Arabian Gulf, Florida, the Bahamas, Maldives, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia.

Peter also enjoys communicating science research to the broader community and has featured in more than 20 television documentaries and many hundreds of other media interviews on television, radio, newspapers, and magazines to highlight marine research and promote conservation. His photographs have been widely published in international and Australian textbooks, popular books, science journals, poster series, magazine articles and newspapers. Peter regularly reviews grant applications for the Australian Research Council (INTREADER reviewer) and other international grant bodies including the US National Science Foundation, and regularly reviews manuscripts for many international research journals.

View Peter's photo gallery

Updated: 01 March 2010