Rate My Professor Sami Rifai

Dr. Sami Rifai serves as a Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences within the College of Sciences at Adelaide University, with promotion to Senior Lecturer scheduled for 2026 onward. He obtained his PhD from the University of Florida in 2016, MSc from the University of Georgia in 2008, and BSc from the University of California, Irvine in 2005. Rifai's academic career includes postdoctoral positions as a Research Associate at the University of New South Wales from 2020 to 2023 and at the University of Oxford from 2017 to 2019, during which he also held an Oxford Martin Fellowship. His research centers on how global change influences ecosystem processes, particularly the impacts of meteorological extremes on vegetation in Australia and the tropics. Rifai specializes in utilizing Earth Observation and remote sensing techniques to investigate ecophysiology and ecosystem ecology. He welcomes discussions on Honours and postgraduate projects related to vegetation responses to global change, including atmospheric aridity effects, photosynthesis and plant water use under warming and elevated CO2, eucalypt forest recovery post-bushfire, seagrass dynamics amid coastal turbidity, and rangeland conservation management impacts.

Rifai has secured significant funding through competitive grants, such as the ARC Discovery project 'Australian tropical rainforests in the face of climate change' (2024-2027, $547,428) with collaborators including Cernusak, De Kauwe, Grossiord, and Slot, and the SA EcoMap initiative from SmartSat CRC (2024-2026, $299,747). Additional industry-sponsored research includes projects with SA Water on environmental disturbance impacts and benthic cover dynamics (2023-2024). His prolific publication record features contributions to leading journals. Notable works include 'Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change' (Science, 2025), 'Canopy functional trait variation across Earth's tropical forests' (Nature, 2025), 'Amazon rainforest adjusts to long-term experimental drought' (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2025), 'Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia' (Nature Communications, 2024), and 'Remote sensing for rangeland conservation monitoring: Impacts of livestock removal after 15 years' (Journal of Applied Ecology, 2024). Rifai is eligible to supervise Masters and PhD students and contributes to teaching in earth observation and ecology courses.