Rate My Professor Alistair Senior

Associate Professor Alistair Senior is an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. He leads the Nutrition & Life History Lab and serves as Deputy Director of the Charles Perkins Centre Data Science Hub. Senior's research specializes in nutritional ecology, investigating how macronutrient composition influences life-history traits, ageing, lifespan, and health across taxa, from Drosophila to humans. His interdisciplinary approach combines biostatistics, computational biology, data science, machine learning, multi-omics, meta-analysis, and multi-objective optimization to model dietary trade-offs, such as protein leverage and the impacts of branched-chain amino acids on health and appetite. As an internal collaborator in the Charles Perkins Centre's Nutritional Ecology node, he applies the Nutritional Geometry Framework to human nutrition and health challenges.

Senior earned his BSc (Hons) and Master's degrees in the UK at the University of Hull, focusing on molecular ecology and quantitative genetics. He completed his PhD in Zoology at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 2014 under Shinichi Nakagawa, studying gene-environment interactions and sex determination in fish. In 2014, he joined the University of Sydney to work on nutritional ecology with Professors Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer. In 2018, he received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award to launch his independent research program on nutrition and life-history variability. Subsequent accolades include a University of Sydney Horizon Fellowship and an ARC Future Fellowship in 2023 valued at over $1 million. His influential publications encompass 'Meta-evaluation of meta-analysis: ten appraisal questions for biologists' (2017), 'Heterogeneity in ecological and evolutionary meta-analyses: its magnitude and implications' (2016), 'Branched-chain amino acids impact health and lifespan indirectly via amino acid balance and appetite control' (2019), and 'The orchard plot: cultivating a forest plot for use in ecology, evolution, and beyond' (2021), amassing over 7,500 citations. Senior's work has reshaped meta-analytic practices in ecology and evolution while informing sustainable dietary strategies for healthy ageing.