Rate My Professor Rose Andrew

Associate Professor Rose Andrew is an Associate Professor of Plant Molecular Ecology in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England. She has a diverse background in ecology, genetics, and evolution of wild plants and animals. Andrew earned her BSc with First Class Honours from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2001, researching the genetics and maintenance of sympatric morphological variation in the Acacia aneura species complex at the CSIRO Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research. She served as Technical Officer at ANU from 2001 to 2003. Her PhD from ANU in 2007 focused on the population and quantitative genetics of herbivore defences in Eucalyptus leaves, using microsatellites, phytochemistry, and field experiments. From 2007 to 2013, she was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, studying landscape genetics and population genomics in a recently diverged Helianthus sunflower ecotype in extreme sand dune conditions.

Andrew joined the University of New England in 2014 as Lecturer, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018 and to Associate Professor thereafter. She has developed a research program in Eucalyptus speciation genomics, with collaborations in plant systematics and pollination genomics. Her research interests include plant evolution, molecular ecology, population genetics, phytochemistry, plant genomics, Eucalyptus hybridisation and adaptation, genomics of pollinator-driven speciation in Australian sexually-deceptive orchids, and evolution and introgression in naturalised sunflowers. She leads the Molecular Ecology Laboratory group, supervises undergraduate, honours, and postgraduate students in population genetics, species delimitation, and genomics, and serves as Convenor of the Life, Earth and Environment Theme to strengthen teaching in organismal biology, evolution, and earth science. She coordinates EVOL211/411 Evolution and Biogeography and ECOL320 Molecular Ecology. Key publications include "The K = 2 conundrum" (Molecular Ecology, 2017), "Explaining intraspecific diversity in plant secondary metabolites in an ecological context" (New Phytologist, 2014), "The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age" (Current Biology, 2014), "Multiple chromosomal inversions contribute to adaptive divergence of a dune sunflower ecotype" (Molecular Ecology, 2020), and "Phylogenomics and the rise of the angiosperms" (Nature, 2024).