Joanne Birch

Dr Joanne Birch is a Senior Lecturer in the School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on understanding the evolution and diversity of native Australian plant and fungal lineages. Current research projects use genomic data to infer the evolutionary relationships of native lineages, assess how distributions of extant taxa have been shaped by evolutionary processes over time, and investigate the traits that have enabled Australian taxa to adapt to changing climatic conditions during the Tertiary. In her role as Curator of the University of Melbourne Herbarium, Joanne is investigating the application of new technologies to increase access to collection-based biodiversity research data and to improve efficiency of the curation and digitisation pipelines in natural history collections.