Penny van Oosterzee

Penny van Oosterzee is an Adjunct Associate Professor at James Cook University in Queensland Australia with a PhD on climate change policies relating to landuse. Her current research areas focus on policy agendas related to ecosystem services including carbon sequestration, biodiversity and climate change abatement. Penny is currently converting a paddock to a rainforest. Her first love, evolutionary biology and biogeography, has seen Penny write several award-winning books including about the ecology of Australia’s deserts, and tropics; the Wallace Line that catalysed the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin by the discovery of the near-magical Wallace Line by Alfred Russel Wallace; and a co-authored book about the dramatic discovery of the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) on Flores.

Penny has also run award-winning ecotourism and environmental consultancies. She was brought up in South Australia in a small country town called Yankalilla and has spent much of her life in Australia’s outback deserts, tropics and now Wet Tropics. She is married and has a son and two grand-children. She also has fat cattle, fat cattle dogs, and several re-homed battery hens.