Researcher biography
Dr. Liam Lachs is a marine scientist specialising in heatwaves impacts and eco-evolutionary dynamics on coral reef ecosystems. He is working on uncovering the natural capacity for corals to adapt to climate change and how this could support reefs, drawing from the past and present to then project future trajectories under warming and inform the design of effective climate-smart reef management strategies.
Dr. Lachs received his PhD from Newcastle University and was awarded by Science and SciLifeLab for research excellence in combining demography, ecology, evolutionary biology, and climate modelling, to explore marine heatwave impacts at numerous spatial and temporal scales. His works have included fine-tuning global predictions of mass bleaching, testing for historic shifts in coral thermal tolerance, and quantifying the evolutionary potential of corals to answer the long-standing question: can coral adaptation keep pace with ocean warming?
Now, Dr. Lachs is working at The University of Queensland as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the CORALADAPT project, generating some of the fundamental science insights needed to design climate-smart evolution-informed reef management and restoration interventions. He also contributes to the coral heat stress task team of the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST), the AIMS-led group on Quantitative Genetics for Operationalising Assisted Evolution, the European Marine Board group for Coastal Resilience, and as a scientific advisor to the PICRC project developing a climate-smart framework for coral reef restoration in Palau.