Rate My Professor Devi Stuart-Fox

Devi Stuart-Fox is Professor in the School of BioSciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Melbourne, where she leads the Biology of Light and Colour research group. She has published extensively on the evolution of animal coloration and colour change, working on a variety of species. Her research examines the production, perception, and biological functions of colours across diverse animal taxa, including lizards, insects, birds, and spiders. Studies range from nanoscale structural mechanisms generating colour to macroevolutionary patterns of colour diversity. She explores applications in bioinspired and biomimetic materials for controlling light and heat.

She earned her PhD from the University of Queensland in 2003, followed by four years of postdoctoral research at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa focusing on colour change in chameleons. In 2007, she joined the University of Melbourne as a lecturer and was promoted to Professor in 2020. She teaches subjects in evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, and field ecology, and serves as chair of examiners for PhD theses. Devi Stuart-Fox has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Reviews Materials, American Naturalist, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B, accumulating more than 9,600 citations on Google Scholar. Notable publications include "Natural selection on social signals: signal efficacy and the evolution of chameleon display coloration" (American Naturalist, 2007), "Accelerated speciation in colour-polymorphic birds" (Nature, 2012), "Thermal consequences of colour and near-infrared reflectance" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2017), and "Bio-informed materials: three guiding principles for innovation informed by biology" (Nature Reviews Materials, 2023).

Her achievements include the L’Oréal-UNESCO ‘In the footsteps of Marie Curie’ Special Fellowship (2013), Woodward Medal in Science and Technology (2017), Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, and a program grant exceeding $1 million from the Human Frontier Science Program Organisation (2022). She has been an associate editor for Proceedings of the Royal Society B since 2017, co-chairs the Melbourne Hallmark Research Initiative on Bioinspiration, and served as a jury member for L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Fellowships in Australia and New Zealand. A strong advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in science, her work influences evolutionary biology, animal signalling, and bioinspired technologies.