Rate My Professor Nicholas Clark

Dr. Nicholas J. Clark is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow in the School of Veterinary Science within the Faculty of Science at the University of Queensland. He earned his PhD from Griffith University with a thesis on the distribution and diversity of avian malaria parasites in Australian and Southern Melanesian birds, a Graduate Diploma in Research Methods from James Cook University focusing on connectivity of butterflyfishes using molecular methods and field observations, and a BSc (Honours) from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. During his PhD, Clark led field expeditions across diverse habitats, developed programming skills for epidemiological analyses using frequentist and Bayesian techniques, and published ten peer-reviewed papers.

Clark's career at the University of Queensland began in 2016 as a Research Assistant, advancing to Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer (2016-2019) under Associate Professor Ricardo Soares Magalhães, Lecturer (2019-2021) under Professor Nigel Perkins, and his current ARC DECRA Fellowship since 2021. He has supervised PhD and undergraduate students, coordinated courses including Ecological and Disease Genetics, Animal Breeding and Genetics, and Molecular and Quantitative Genetics, and received a nomination for the Golden Speculum Best Lecturer award. Securing over $700,000 in external funding from sources like the ARC, UQ Early Career Research Grants, and National Geographic, Clark develops computational tools and adapts statistical network and time series forecasting methods to study ecological community assembly and responses to environmental change. Notable publications include "Rapid winter warming will disproportionately disrupt marine fish community structure" (Nature Climate Change, 2020), "Dynamic Generalised Additive Models (DGAMs) for forecasting discrete ecological time series" (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2022), "Near-term forecasting of companion animal tick paralysis incidence: An iterative ensemble model" (PLoS Computational Biology, 2022), and the highly cited "A review of global diversity in avian haemosporidians (Plasmodium and Haemoproteus: Haemosporida): new insights from molecular data" (International Journal for Parasitology, 2014). With more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, he maintains four R packages for molecular genetics and ecology research and contributes to international collaborations on parasite ecology and disease risk.