Biography

Geoff McFadden took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Melbourne.  He made two trips to Antarctica to study sea ice algae while completing a PhD in the Botany School, University of Melbourne in 1984.  He then took up a three year postdoctoral position in algal cell biology in Muenster, Germany.  Geoff returned to Australia on a prestigious QEII Fellowship in 1987 to join Prof Adrienne Clarke’s Plant Cell Biology Research Centre, where he worked on the molecular biology of barley and tobacco.  He subsequently received an ARC Senior Research Fellowship then a Professorial Research Fellowship to investigate the origin of chloroplasts by endosymbiosis.  In 1995 Geoff spent a year at the Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Canada.  Geoff now holds the Australian Research Council’s premier post of Federation Fellow and is back in the School of Botany, University of Melbourne.  

Geoff identified the relict chloroplast in malaria parasites and is developing herbicides as antimalarial drugs.  He has published 150 papers, many in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, EMBO J, and PNAS.  He has 13 papers with more than 100 citations, 5,589 career citations, and an h-index of 40.  Geoff has been awarded the Goldacre Medal, the Australian Academy of Science's Frederick White Prize, two Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar’s awards, The David Syme Medal, the Woodward Medal for excellence in Science & Technology, the Julian Wells Medal, the Miescher-Ishida Prize, and is a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences.  Geoff’s PhD students have also received prestigious awards such as a Victoria Fellowship, a Peter Doherty Fellowship, a CJ Martin Fellowship and the Premier’s Prize for medical research in recent years.  Geoff lives near Bells Beach and surfs as much as he can.