Rate My Professor Graeme Cumming

Professor Graeme Cumming is a Professor at the UWA Oceans Institute and Premier's Science Fellow in the School of Earth and Oceans at the University of Western Australia, a position he has held since mid-2023. He completed an honours degree in Zoology and Entomology at Rhodes University in South Africa and earned his D.Phil. in 1999 from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, with a thesis on the evolutionary ecology of African ticks supervised by Drs. Sarah Randolph and David Rogers. Prior roles include Professor, Reef Research Leader, and Director (2020-2022) at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University (2015-2023); Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town (2006-2015); Assistant Professor in Landscape Ecology at the University of Florida (2001-2005); and David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999-2001).

Cumming's research focuses on spatial aspects of ecology, broad-scale pattern-process dynamics in ecosystems and social-ecological systems, resilience, landscape and seascape ecology, biodiversity conservation, protected areas, and ecosystem services. His current Premier's Science Fellowship investigates social-ecological feedbacks and contributions of coastal protected areas to regional resilience. He has produced 195 articles, 30 reviews, 13 editorials, and 4 book chapters, including recent works such as 'Protected area management has significant spillover effects on vegetation' in Nature (2026), 'A synthesis of principles for building the social-ecological resilience and adaptive capacity of protected and conserved areas' in Conservation Biology (2026), and 'Differences in government support for private sector climate change adaptation in developing versus developed countries' in npj Climate Action (2026). His publications have garnered over 37,000 citations on Google Scholar. Awards include the Rhodes Scholarship, David H. Smith Fellowship, Premier's Science Fellowship, S2A3 British Association Medal (2013), and NSTF-BHP Billiton Award for research contributions (2015). He supervises multiple PhD students and leads ARC projects on protected area resilience.