Rate My Professor Simon Hart

Simon Hart is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Biology in the School of the Environment, Faculty of Science, at the University of Queensland. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Melbourne, completing Honours research under Professor Mick Keough on experiments and statistical modelling. Hart obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Queensland, honing skills in statistical model fitting to connect mathematical theory with ecological data. Early in his career, he worked as a research assistant on ringtail possum population dynamics, interned at CSIRO Marine Laboratories in Hobart, studied Australian fur seals on Kanowna Island, and conducted environmental consulting surveys of Victoria’s 24 marine protected areas, identifying marine species assemblages. Post-PhD, he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, followed by a position at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, exploring stochasticity, environmental variation, rapid evolution, and ecological community dynamics. He joined the University of Queensland as a Lecturer, advancing to Senior Lecturer and redirecting his research toward freshwater ecosystems.

Hart’s ecological research seeks to uncover processes governing the rise and fall of animal and plant populations, centering on flowing freshwater ecosystems including streams, rivers, and wetlands—the most biodiverse per unit area, yet critically threatened. His Hart Lab employs theory, observations, and experiments to investigate rapid evolution, phenotypic plasticity, species coexistence, heatwave impacts, eutrophication tipping points, temperature-nutrient fluctuations, and biodiversity in West African cocoa agroforestry. Prominent publications encompass “How variation between individuals affects species coexistence” (Ecology Letters, 2016), “Climate-smart sustainable agriculture in low-to-intermediate shade agroforests” (Nature Sustainability, 2018), “The spatial scales of species coexistence” (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2017), “Effects of rapid evolution on species coexistence” (PNAS, 2019), “Phenotypic plasticity promotes species coexistence” (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2022), and “How does facilitation influence the outcome of species interactions?” (Journal of Ecology, 2023). He has obtained grants from the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects (2022–2025), Lindt Cocoa Foundation (2024–2027), European Cocoa Association, and ETH Zurich. Hart supervises multiple PhD candidates on eco-evolutionary and conservation topics and acts as a media expert on biodiversity, climate change, ecology, evolution, and freshwater issues, contributing significantly to advancing ecological theory and conservation practices.