Rate My Professor Marilyn Ball

Professor Marilyn Ball is an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University (ANU), where she leads the Ball Group focused on the ecophysiology of salinity and freezing tolerance within the Division of Plant Sciences. She received her PhD in Environmental Biology from ANU in 1982, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 1984 and at ANU's North Australia Research Unit in Darwin from 1985 to 1988. In 1989, she was awarded an ARC National Research Fellowship, leading to her appointment in a tenured position in biology at ANU in 1990, where she has since directed an ecophysiological research group. She serves on the editorial boards of Ecosystems, Global Change Biology, Oecologia, Plant, Cell & Environment, and Tree Physiology, and is a member of the Australian Antarctic Research Advisory Committee. Her distinguished contributions have earned her several honors, including election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2009, the Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Contribution to the University in 2015, the Peter Baume Award in 2015, the Joint College Award for Excellence in Education in 2009, and the Lifetime Honorary Member Award from the Ecological Society of America in 2007.

Marilyn Ball's research investigates how physiological adaptations and responses to environmental stresses influence the structure and functioning of plant communities along environmental gradients. Her work explores evolutionary trade-offs in plant morphology between stress tolerance and the coordination of hydraulic and photosynthetic activity in leaves, with implications for carbon gain, leaf structure, and the capacity of evergreen species to respond to climate warming and rising atmospheric CO2. Studies encompass mangroves, temperate evergreen sclerophylls, and Antarctic vegetation, addressing topics such as salinity tolerance along aridity gradients, coping with temperature extremes under drought, and carbon gain in Antarctic mosses under climate change. Key publications include Feller et al. (2010) 'Biocomplexity in mangrove ecosystems' in Annual Review of Marine Science; Lovelock et al. (2009) 'Nutrient enrichment increases mortality of mangroves' in PLoS ONE; Stuart et al. (2007) 'The role of freezing in setting the latitudinal limits of mangrove forests' in New Phytologist; Ball et al. (2006) 'Freeze-induced embolism depends on nadir temperature: the heterogeneous hydration hypothesis' in Plant, Cell & Environment; and Lenné et al. (2010) 'Freeze avoidance: a dehydrating moss gathers no ice' in Plant, Cell & Environment. She has secured funding through multiple ARC Discovery Grants, such as those on salinity tolerance in mangroves (2010-2012) and temperature extremes (2011-2013), as well as Australian Antarctic Science projects on mosses and freezing tolerance (2009-2010).