Rate My Professor Joan Leach

Professor Joan Leach is Acting Provost and Senior Vice-President at the Australian National University. She holds a BA Hons, BSc, MA and PhD. Professor Leach joined ANU in 2016 as Director of the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, a role she held until early 2025. She previously served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education). Prior to ANU, she held teaching and research positions at Imperial College London, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Queensland.

Professor Leach is a leading global expert in science communication, with research centred on public engagement with controversial and frontier science, the ethics of science communication, social epistemology, and rhetorical approaches to scientific argumentation. Her work addresses topics including synthetic biology, quantum technologies and population health. She is the author, with Fabien Medvecky, of An Ethics of Science Communication and co-editor of Science Communication: A Global Perspective. She edited the journal Social Epistemology for nine years and has supervised more than 30 PhD students. Professor Leach is a past president of Australian Science Communicators, a founding member of the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology, and past Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Australian Academy of Science. She received a science laureateship from Purdue University for services to public engagement with science. From 2020 to 2024 she served two terms as Chair of the ANU Academic Board.