Associate Professor Debra Judge is a biological anthropologist and evolutionary ecologist in the School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia. She received her BS in Behavioral and Ecological Biology and MS in Animal Ecology from the University of California, Davis, and completed her PhD at the same institution. Her career includes a lecturing position from September 1987 to June 1996, prior to her appointment as Associate Professor. Judge's research centers on behavioral ecology, examining the ecology and social dynamics of family-living species. She specializes in human behavioral ecology, cooperative breeding, and factors influencing child growth and family dynamics, with extensive fieldwork in rural Timor-Leste communities. Her projects investigate longitudinal measures of child growth, household dietary diversity, family composition, resource strategies, social organization, and food production, funded in part by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP120101588. Additional studies explore primate social behavior, including infant handling by female mountain gorillas and homosexual behavior in the species.

Judge has authored or co-authored numerous key publications, such as 'Child size and household characteristics in rural Timor-Leste' (Reghupathy et al., 2012, American Journal of Human Biology), 'Growth curves and the international standard: How should we assess child growth?' (Spencer et al., 2018), 'The seasonal relationships between household dietary diversity and child growth in a rural Timor-Leste community' (Dri et al., 2022, Maternal & Child Nutrition), and 'Grandparental investment: Past, present, and future' (Coall et al., 2010, Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Her scholarly output reflects an h-index of 14 and 2,427 citations on Google Scholar. She supervises honors and master's research projects on human behavioral ecology, contributes to the EcoPeoPle: Ecology, People Place Research Group, and serves as an elected member of the UWA Academic Board and in the Academic Staff Association's academic consultative committee. Judge has participated in public outreach, including ABC radio discussions on women's roles in early human societies (2022) and humans' relationship with fire (2024).

Professional Email: debra.judge@uwa.edu.au