Rate My Professor Craig White

Professor Craig White is Head of the School of Biological Sciences in the Faculty of Science at Monash University. An evolutionary physiologist, he investigates the causes and consequences of physiological variation in animals. White earned his PhD in 2004 from the University of Adelaide, supervised by Professor Roger Seymour, on the scaling of metabolic rate in mammals. He then undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Birmingham in the UK with Professors Graham Martin and Pat Butler, studying the visual and energetic determinants of pursuit-dive foraging in great cormorants. In 2007, he joined the University of Queensland as Lecturer in Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology, establishing his research group there. Awards during this period include the Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship and University of Queensland Foundation Research Excellence Award in 2009, and the Society for Experimental Biology President's Medal for the Animal Section in 2011. In 2013, promoted to Associate Professor at Queensland, he received an ARC Future Fellowship and moved to Monash University as Professor in the School of Biological Sciences. He served as Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Science from 2018 to 2020, Acting Head of School from October 2020, and was appointed Head of School in June 2021.

White leads the Evolutionary Physiology Research Group, using manipulative experiments, comparative studies, experimental evolution, and quantitative genetic analyses to examine traits including body size, metabolic rate, water loss, and breathing patterns across more than 60 species, mainly insects but also marine invertebrates, arthropods, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Current research addresses the evolution of periodic ventilation in insects, macrophysiological and allometric variation in energy expenditure, and physiological influences on community structure, with study species such as slime moulds, scarab beetles, bumble bees, cockroaches, air-breathing fish, rainbowfish, cane toads, Drosophila, and benthic marine invertebrates. He has produced nearly 200 publications, with over 14,000 citations on Google Scholar. Key works include “Physiological plasticity increases resilience of ectothermic animals to climate change” (Nature Climate Change, 2015; 1,323 citations), “Mammalian basal metabolic rate is proportional to body mass^2/3” (PNAS, 2003; 904 citations), “Moving towards acceleration for estimates of activity-specific metabolic rate in free-living animals: the case of the cormorant” (Journal of Animal Ecology, 2006; 876 citations), “Fish reproductive-energy output increases disproportionately with body size” (Science, 2018; 753 citations), and “Allometric scaling of mammalian metabolism” (Journal of Experimental Biology, 2005; 536 citations). His contributions align with UN Sustainable Development Goals 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15.