Staff Scientist and Senior Curator of Palaeobotany.
Department of Geology-Palaeontology.
Natural History Museum of Vienna.
Palaeobotanist. Palaeontologist. Science Educator.
Environmental change, both past and present, is imprinted on the plants. By studying the plants of prehistory, I aim to uncover how life on Earth has responded to past intervals of extreme warming.
I received my Ph.D. in 2012 from Monash University, Australia.
From 2012 to 2017, I was Associate Lecturer of Palaeontology and Sedimentary Geology and Postdoctoral Researcher at Monash University.
From 2017 to 2021, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History (Stockholm, Sweden), where I explored the responses of fossil plants to extreme environmental changes.
From 2022-2024, I was Lecturer of Palaentology at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, and Leader of the Mass Extinction Group. I retain an Adjunct Lecturer role at University College Cork, and my team and I have been investigating the extinction and recovery trends of flora during the most devastating mass extinctions of all time.
Since 2024, I have been in charge of the fossil plant collections at the Natural History Museum of Vienna. With >120,000 specimens, these are the largest fossil plant collections in Austria, and span >400 million years of plant evolutionary history. I continue to research land ecosystem responses to extreme warming events in Earth’s past.
I am Associate Editor for Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
PalaeoMays 