Lesley Head awarded a Laureate Fellowship
The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, announced on 22 June 2009, in a ceremony at Parliament House, that 15 world-leading scholars will be awarded Australian Laureate Fellowships worth around $2.7 million each.
One of the scholars awarded a Fellowship is the President of the Institute of Australian Geographers, Professor Lesley Head.
In announcing the awards Senator Carr said that the Australian Laureate Fellowship scheme takes the best elements of the previous Federation Fellowships scheme and adds a focus on team work, career paths and leadership. ‘As part of the Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme, successful fellows will lead and mentor the next generation of research leaders, helping to build Australia’s international competitive research capacity. The work will focus on areas of national economic, environmental, cultural and social benefit …’
The 15 successful Australian Laureate Fellows were selected from a highly competitive field of 148 researchers, and the Fellowships are worth around $2.7 million each.
Professor Head was awarded her Fellowship for work in the area of cultural environmental research: the missing link in multidisciplinary approaches to sustainability. The announcement of her award provided the following biographical information.
Professor Head is Professor and Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong. Her research has focused on long-term changes in the Australian landscape and the material and conceptual interactions that both prehistoric and contemporary peoples have had with these environments.
Professor Head’s project will bring together two main intellectual currents; geographical and archaeological understandings of long term environmental change, including anthropogenic contributions, combined with a critical social sciences perspective on relations between human and non-human worlds. This research will contribute to building Australia’s international research presence in the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, with particular strengths in ethnographic and related social science methods.
Professor Head was awarded her PhD in Geography from Monash University. She was appointed the King Carl XVI Gustaf Visiting Professor of Environmental Science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. She is the only Australian to have received this award. Professor Head was Director of the GeoQuEST Research Centre and has been elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and is currently the President of the Institute Australian Geographers.
Professor Head has been involved in a number of committees, and has been the Chair (2006-08) of the Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Geography.