Professor Peter Banks is a Professor of Conservation Biology in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Sydney, appointed in 2016. He obtained his BSc in 1991 and PhD in Science in 1997 from the University of Sydney. Earlier in his career, he served as Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney from 2011 and as Associate Professor in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales in 2010. Banks is a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society (FRZS) and holds ORCID 0000-0002-4340-6495.

Banks leads the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation research group, developing humane, ecologically-based solutions to conservation problems, with specializations in behavioural ecology of alien and invasive species, olfactory misinformation for protecting wildlife and agriculture from pests, predator-prey naiveté, urban ecology, and human-wildlife conflict. His practical research includes scent-masking techniques using wheat germ oil to prevent crop damage by mice. With 11,897 citations and an h-index of 53 on Google Scholar, key publications encompass 'Alien predators are more dangerous than native predators to prey populations' (667 citations), 'A review of camera trapping for conservation behaviour research' (296 citations), 'Four-legged friend or foe? Dog walking displaces native birds from natural areas' (238 citations), 'Alien predation and the effects of multiple levels of prey naiveté' (216 citations), 'Invader Relative Impact Potential: a new metric to understand and predict the ecological impacts of existing, emerging and future invasive alien species' (214 citations), and others in journals like Trends in Ecology & Evolution and Biological Conservation. In 2024, Banks and the Sensory Conservation Team received the Eureka Prize for Environmental Research.

Professional Email: peter.banks@sydney.edu.au