About Prof Hugh Possingham

Hugh is dedicated to conserving biodiversity – eg Great Barrier Reef marine rezoning, Marxan, Brigalow declaration, threatened species and decision science for conservation. He is also Vice-President of BirdLife Australia.

Professor Possingham has a Bachelor’s degree with Honours in Applied Mathematics from the University of Adelaide and a doctorate in Ecological Modelling as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He has worked for numerous universities as a professor, department head, and led several research centres.

Most notably he co-developed the Marxan software for conservation planning, which has been described as “the most significant contribution to conservation biology to emerge from Australia’s research community”.

His most recent role was as Queensland’s Chief Scientist and prior to that, the Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, which has protected more than 40 million hectares of land and thousands of kilometres of rivers worldwide.

The Romeo Lahey Memorial Lecture honours the principal founder of the National Parks Association of Queensland (NPAQ), who remained President or more than 30 years and was instrumental in convincing the Queensland Government to declare many of the state’s national parks gazetted up to the 1970s.

Lahey was also co-founder of Binna Burra Lodge, located within the world heritage listed Lamington National Park.

Just one week after the Queensland Governor Sir John Goodwin opened the Brisbane City Hall the inaugural meeting of the National Parks Association of Queensland was held in the Lord Mayor’s Reception Room of the Brisbane City Hall on 15th April, 1930.

In recognition of the historical link, this year the NPAQ Romeo Lahey Memorial lecture will again be held at City Hall.