A transdisciplinary journey

The beginning 

I grew up in the New South Wales forest near “Protestor’s Falls”, the site of the 1979 Terania Creek protests. This site marked the “origin of Australia’s environmental movement” with non-violent direct-action blockades against deforestation. Both my parents were science teachers and very much environmentalists. My mother was also an artist and was actively reforesting our property. We were, I guess, kind of hippies. 

For most of my childhood we had no television, so I spent my time playing in the forest and illustrating wildlife for the local newspaper. It didn’t take long for me to fixate on becoming a vet so I could “work with animals”. But when I finally started my vet degree, I soon realised it wasn’t about wildlife... Yes, I was that naïve, but who isn’t when they’ve just turned 18?  
 

The switch 

So, I suffered through the long years of dissecting dogs and inadvertently inhaling formalin as a veterinary student. Meanwhile, I snapped up every opportunity I could find related to wildlife, ecology and conservation. At the beginning of my Honours research year studying the health and ecology of urban brushtail possums, I distinctly remember attempting to learn an entire ecology degree’s worth of material (including numerous textbooks), for the sheer love and fascination of it. I had finally found the metaphorical home for my career. 

From then on it was just a matter of time until I could finally convince myself that I would never, ever want to work as a practising clinical veterinarian again. It didn’t take long. Dr Timothy Portas (Zoo Veterinarian at Western Plains Zoo at the time) finally shook some sense into me: “It’s not going to be enough for you to just work with individual wildlife in zoos, Laura. I can see that you want to have a broader impact. You need to go back and do research.” 

Now, any good careers advisor will tell you to “make the most of your career capital”, which is to say, don’t just throw away eight years of training and experience on a whim! I had this foundation of understanding how animals work and, also, how disease can stop things from working. So, it made sense to utilise this expertise when transitioning to a career in ecology and conservation focused on wildlife. “That’s it”, I thought. “Research on wildlife disease ecology! That’s what I need to do!” 

I had found my super-power. There tends to be a disciplinary (and scale) divide between vets and ecologists – they don’t really speak the same language. But trained as a vet, and having taken a transdisciplinary leap into wildlife ecology and conservation, I now had the language and understanding to bridge the two. And it turns out that getting everyone understanding each other is becoming pretty important these days – enter the One Health and Planetary Health paradigms. 

The calling 

In recent decades, there’s been a marked increase in the number of emerging infectious diseases that cross disciplinary silos – the COVID-19 pandemic will no doubt come to mind as a zoonotic disease that affects humans and animals and has had profound socioeconomic impacts globally. But there are numerous other diseases having devastating impacts  on our wildlife that have largely flown under the radar. Unexpectedly, fungal diseases seem to be having a heyday. 

For my PhD I focused on the most significant disease, amphibian chytridiomycosis. This fungal skin disease of frogs has caused greater loss of biodiversity than any other disease of vertebrates ever recorded. We’re not just talking about range contractions and extirpation of frog populations here. We’re talking about a single disease wiping out 90 species of frogs around the world and causing the decline of at least 500 more species. Many of the declines are ongoing – this is still an urgent issue. 

Now, the problem with mitigating infectious diseases of wildlife is that you’re dealing with the interaction of dynamic processes with a multitude of drivers. The tiny beasties doing the damage – the pathogens and parasites – have their own population dynamics. You also must work across multiple scales including the individual animal, the population and the landscape scale. This is not just a case of “restore habitat and the wildlife will come back”. In the case of frog chytrid fungus, the most affected species were in near-pristine habitats. So how on earth do we fix this? 

However, the features of wildlife disease that make it challenging also make it deeply conceptually fascinating and rewarding. It’s complex. We’re at a frontier. We humans are fundamentally responsible for spreading these most devastating diseases to new populations and  species. But we also have the profound opportunity and immense potential to actually make a difference. 
 

The Biodiversity Health Research Team and beyond 

In the 15 years since I started my PhD studying wildlife disease, then later set up my own research team, I have become more and more captivated by this topic. We are now called the Biodiversity Health Research Team. Leading a team is without doubt the most rewarding part of my job as an academic – it is an absolute privilege to inspire and empower the next generation of conservation researchers and leaders. 

The core of our research is understanding mechanisms that promote population and species recovery in the face of a multitude of threatening processes, usually including infectious diseases such as amphibian chytridiomycosis, koala chlamydiosis, emerging reptile fungal diseases and so on. My team and I work across systems, scales and methodologies: we get out into the field to catch and observe animals; we take samples from animals and their environments; we bring animals into the lab to understand how they can respond and recover from disease and contaminants; we perform advanced immunological, molecular and genetic analyses to understand those responses at the physiological level; and we also model population and community dynamics to understand the mechanisms putatively driving decline or recovery. 

In the past three years, I’ve also had the immense honour of acting as the Chair of the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA) Australasia section, as well as Australasian representative on the International WDA Council, a term that finished in late 2024. My experience in these roles has been incredibly valuable, allowing me to engage with a diverse network of passionate researchers and practitioners in Australia and around the world who share the common goal of improving conservation and welfare outcomes for wildlife. 

The creative and the collective 

While most things in my life revolve around my enduring passion for wildlife and the environment, it’s definitely not all about work. Inspired and encouraged by my artist mother from an early age, my love for the creative arts – a means by which to celebrate and share the beauty of nature – has continued to develop through the years. Photographing and then painting wildlife in glorious colour brings me immense joy which helps to offset some of the more sombre environmental messaging we face day to day when working in the field of conservation.

My other main joy is escaping digital dopamine addiction by sharing my love of tabletop board gaming with friends, family and colleagues. I especially love to teach and play games with environmental themes and beautiful artwork. Bonus points to the game designers if they manage to sneak thematically appropriate ecology mechanisms into the strategy of their games! A few current favourites include Meadow, Wingspan and
The Fox Experiment. 

Having outlets for my passion and creativity, and people to share them with, provides me with essential balance and purpose alongside my conservation-based career goals. 

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