Rate My Professor Stephen Swearer

Professor Stephen Swearer serves as the inaugural Jock Clough Marine Foundation Oceans Chair at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, a role he began in February 2024. He earned a BSc with honours in Aquatic Biology from Brown University in 1991 and a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2001, with his dissertation titled 'Self-recruitment in Coral Reef Fish Populations.' Swearer's academic career includes a lectureship in marine larval biology starting in January 2001 at the University of Melbourne's Department of Zoology, now part of the School of BioSciences, where he was promoted to full professor in 2014 and remained until February 2024. He directed the National Centre for Coasts and Climate from 2016 to 2023 and founded the Research on the Ecology and Evolution of Fishes (REEF) lab, conducting research across tropical, freshwater, estuarine, and temperate reef environments in Australia and internationally. His early research involved field studies at sites such as Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.