Professor Tiffany Morrison holds a professorial appointment in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. She maintains co-appointments as professor in the College of Science and Engineering at James Cook University and as fractional personal professor in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University and Research. Morrison completed her PhD in 2004 at The University of Queensland, with a thesis on complex environmental governance in the USA and Australia. This work was supported by a highly competitive Land and Water Australia scholarship and a visiting fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her early career featured a tenured faculty position from 2004 to 2008 at Flinders University in the School of Political and International Studies, where she taught in the Master of Public Administration program. From 2008 to 2014, she held a tenured role and ARC Super Science Fellowship in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at The University of Queensland. Since 2015, she has served as tenured Social Science Research Leader and co-leader of the People and Ecosystems Program at James Cook University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Morrison’s research centers on the governance of complex environmental change, encompassing polycentric governance architectures, climate adaptation strategies in tropical coastal and reef systems, policy responses to warming ecosystems, and governance frameworks for novel ocean-based climate interventions such as chemically modified seawater and genetically modified coral. She leads the international Governing Changing Oceans program, funded by Australian Research Council Discovery grants and the US Science for Nature and People Partnership (2022-2025), and serves on the Australian Government’s Reef 2050 Expert Panel. In 2025, she was awarded the Australian Laureate Fellowship ($3,762,590) for her project Transforming environmental governance for novel ocean-based climate action, which develops decision tools, partnerships, and capacity-building to minimize social-ecological risks, support marine industries, enhance biodiversity conservation, and advance international climate commitments. Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA) in 2022, she also contributes as an editorial board member for Global Environmental Change. Her highly influential publications include “Coral reefs in the Anthropocene” (Nature, 2017), “Building adaptive capacity to climate change in tropical coastal communities” (Nature Climate Change, 2018), “The black box of power in polycentric environmental governance” (Global Environmental Change, 2019), “Mitigation and adaptation in polycentric systems” (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2017), and “Evolving polycentric governance of the Great Barrier Reef” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017).

Professional Email: tiffany.morrison@unimelb.edu.au