Rate My Professor Jennifer Donelson

Associate Professor Jennifer Donelson is a marine ecologist in the College of Science and Engineering at James Cook University, Townsville, where she serves as an ARC Future Fellow and leads the Marine Ecology and Environmental Change Lab within the Marine and Aquaculture Research Facility and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. She completed her BSc and BSc (Honours) in 2006 at James Cook University, focusing on parental and environmental influences on the early life history of reef fish, followed by a PhD in Marine Biology in 2012 from the same institution. Her doctoral thesis investigated the effects of climate change on reproductive performance and early life history traits of reef fish, supervised by Dr. Philip Munday and Dr. Mark McCormick, with collaborations including Dr. Roland Pitcher of CSIRO. After her PhD, Donelson held a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney from 2013 to 2016. She then undertook a collaborative fellowship between King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies starting in 2016, before returning to James Cook University as Associate Professor.

Donelson's research focuses on the ecology and early life history of marine fishes, with emphasis on ecological impacts of climate change, including ocean warming and acidification, and the potential for acclimation and adaptation through phenotypic plasticity and transgenerational effects. She employs environmentally controlled aquarium systems to simulate future ocean conditions and study developmental plasticity, parental effects, and behavioral responses in coral reef fishes. Her contributions include co-editing theme issues on adaptation and phenotypic plasticity to climate change in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2019) and Frontiers in Marine Science (2022). Key publications feature 'The epigenetic landscape of transgenerational acclimation to ocean warming' (Nature Climate Change, 2018), 'Transgenerational plasticity and climate change experiments: Where do we go from here?' (Global Change Biology, 2018), 'Understanding interactions between plasticity, adaptation and range shifts in response to marine environmental change' (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2019), and 'Rapid adaptive responses to climate change in corals' (Nature Climate Change, 2017). Awards include the ARC Future Fellowship and the 2021 Emerging Leader in Marine Science Award from the Australian Marine Sciences Association.