Rate My Professor Rose Andrew

Dr. Rose Andrew is an Associate Professor of Plant Molecular Ecology at the University of New England in the School of Environmental and Rural Science, Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law. She completed her BSc with First Class Honours in 2001 at the Australian National University, investigating the genetics and maintenance of sympatric morphological variation in the Acacia aneura species complex. Her PhD, awarded in 2007 from ANU, focused on the population and quantitative genetics of herbivore defences in Eucalyptus leaves, incorporating microsatellites, phytochemistry, and field experiments. From 2007 to 2013, she served as Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, researching landscape genetics and population genomics in a recently diverged sunflower ecotype in sand dunes. She joined the University of New England as Lecturer in 2014, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018 and to Associate Professor, where she established a research program in Eucalyptus speciation genomics alongside collaborations in plant systematics and pollination genomics.

Associate Professor Andrew leads the Molecular Ecology Laboratory, training undergraduate, honours, and postgraduate students in population genetics, species delimitation, and genomics. Her research specializations include plant evolution, molecular ecology, population genetics, phytochemistry, plant genomics, Eucalyptus hybridisation and adaptation, genomics of pollinator-driven speciation in Australian sexually-deceptive orchids, and evolution with introgression in naturalised sunflowers. She coordinates EVOL211/411 Evolution and Biogeography and ECOL320/520 Molecular Ecology, and as Convenor of the Life, Earth and Environment Theme, bolsters the academic community in organismal biology, evolution, and earth science. Key publications comprise "The K = 2 conundrum" (Molecular Ecology, 2017), "Explaining intraspecific diversity in plant secondary metabolites in an ecological context" (New Phytologist, 2014), "The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age" (Current Biology, 2014), "Multiple chromosomal inversions contribute to adaptive divergence of a dune sunflower ecotype" (Molecular Ecology, 2020), and "Genomic variation across landscapes: insights and applications" (New Phytologist, 2015). Her scholarship advances knowledge in genetic clustering, data accessibility, and landscape genomic variation.