Associate Professor John Alroy | Department of Biological Sciences

How long have you been a researcher at Macquarie?
I was a Future Fellow here from 2010 through 2014 prior to transitioning into my current role.

What drew you to research?
I’ve pretty much always been interested in biological diversity, at least as far back as age six. What I’m doing right now follows on directly from what I wanted to know at that age.

What would be an ‘elevator pitch’ of your research area?
I work on large-scale diversity and extinction patterns and try to answer questions such as “how likely is it that something has gone extinct given you haven’t seen it in a few years?”

In layman’s terms, what is the wider impact of your research?
My hope is to raise consciousness about the current mass extinction by quantifying it. Previously, I focused on putting this extinction in a larger context by looking at similar events in the deep fossil record.

Who is/was your biggest research mentor?
I studied under palaeobiologists Dave Raup, Jack Sepkoski, and Leigh Van Valen at the University of Chicago, and they all had a big influence on me. I spent something like two decades essentially redoing work that they’d done in the 1970s and 1980s (but no longer, I’ve now moved on to ecology).

If you were given $1Million in research funding, what would be the first thing you would do?
I would love to have a real team working on the database I run, which is called the Ecological Register. So, I’d spend the money on postdocs and students.

Where do you see your research in 10 years?
I see research as a creative process, so I’m happy to say that I have no idea what I’ll have come up with one year from today – much less ten!

What has been your favourite and/or proudest research moment?
I’m not sure, but one of the most amusing was when I came up with a really cool new equation while eating a burrito. I have no idea what the connection was, but I have to say the salsa was pretty good!