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Andrew Cockburn holds the position of Group Leader of the Cockburn Group in Evolutionary Ecology within the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University, where he has worked since 1983, initially as a Queen Elizabeth II Fellow. He obtained an honours degree in botany and a PhD in zoology from Monash University. His postdoctoral research included studies on population dynamics of microtine rodents at UC Berkeley, and further postdocs at Monash University, CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology, and the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU. Appointed the first Professor in the Department of Zoology at ANU in 1990, he served as Head of the School of Botany and Zoology for 13 years, Dean of the Faculty of Science for one year, and Director of the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment from June 2009 to April 2014.
Cockburn's research specializations encompass the evolution of life histories, complex mating systems, and gender roles in animal societies, with a focus on cooperative breeding in Australian birds such as superb fairy-wrens, woodswallows, kookaburras, bee-eaters, kingfishers, thornbills, choughs, and parrots, as well as earlier work on dasyurid marsupials like Antechinus. He has authored key publications including "Cooperative Breeding in Birds: Toward a Richer Conceptual Framework" (2013), "Evolutionary origins and persistence of infidelity in Malurus: the least faithful birds" (2013, Emu), "Dance choreography is coordinated with song repertoire in a complex avian display" (2013, Current Biology), and "Fluctuations in population composition dampen the impact of phenotypic plasticity on trait dynamics in superb fairy-wrens" (2012, Journal of Animal Ecology). Among his major awards are Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (2001), Centenary Medal (2003), D.L. Serventy Medal (2004), Gottschalk Medal (1988), Edgeworth David Medal (1987), Ellis Troughton Memorial Award (2010), and presidency of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (2018-2020). Cockburn supervised over 40 doctoral students, authored the textbook An Introduction to Evolutionary Ecology, and held editorships including Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
New ANU research predicts the Superb Fairy-wren's local extinction in 30-40 years from climate impacts. Explore the study's findings, methods, and conservation calls.
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