Rate My Professor Rachael Gallagher

Rachael Gallagher is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University, where she completed her PhD in 2008 on the functional ecology of climbing plants. After her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral fellowships mainly in the southwestern United States while maintaining part-time academic positions and worked at the New South Wales Herbarium, digitizing specimens and building expertise in natural history collections and Australian flora taxonomy. Gallagher was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from 2017 to 2021 for the project "Life on the edge: species interactions shaping range boundaries." She progressed to senior lecturer in Biological Sciences at Macquarie University and now holds the position of Professor in Plant Conservation & Ecology at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University since 2021, retaining her honorary appointment at Macquarie until 2026. She has been a member of the Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee since 2020 and served as Deputy Chair and member of the NSW Threatened Species Scientific Committee from 2016 to 2021.

A plant ecologist and conservation biologist, Gallagher's research centers on plant functional traits in conservation science, plant responses to climate change including hotter, drier, and more fire-prone conditions, ecological restoration, and bushfire impacts. Her work has garnered a Scopus h-index of 39 and over 9,000 citations. Notable publications include "Climate change increases global risk to urban forests" (Esperon-Rodriguez et al., Nature Climate Change, 2022; 323 citations), "Areas of global importance for conserving terrestrial biodiversity, carbon and water" (Jung et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2021; 430 citations), "Open Science principles for accelerating trait-based research across the Anthropocene" (Gallagher et al., Ecology Letters, 2020; 273 citations), and "High fire frequency and the impact of the 2019–2020 megafires on Australian plant species" (Gallagher et al., Diversity and Distributions, 2021; 179 citations). Awards include the NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2015), Macquarie University Academic Staff Award for Excellence in Research (Highly Commended), and NSW Premier’s Prize for Early Career Researcher of the Year in Biological Sciences (2020). She has delivered plenary addresses at the Association for Fire Ecology Conference (Italy, 2022), Australian Network for Plant Conservation Conference (2022), and International Association for Vegetation Science Conference (2023), and contributes to projects like the AusTraits database and national bushfire-affected species assessments.