Pauline Yvonne Ladiges (born 1948) is a botanist whose contributions have been significant both in building the field of

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overl ...

and

historical biogeography Phylogeography is the study of the historical processes that may be responsible for the past to present geographic distributions of genealogical lineages. This is accomplished by considering the geographic distribution of individuals in light of ge ...

of Australian plants, particularly

Eucalypt Eucalypt is a descriptive name for woody plants with capsule fruiting bodies belonging to seven closely related genera (of the tribe Eucalypteae) found across Australasia: ''Eucalyptus'', ''Corymbia'', ''Angophora'', '' Stockwellia'', ''Allosyn ...

s and flora, and in science education at all levels. She is professorial fellow in the School of Botany at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb no ...

, where she has previously held a personal chair and was head of the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne from 1992 to 2010. She has been a

fellow of the Australian Academy of Science The Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science is made up of about 500 Australian scientists. Scientists judged by their peers to have made an exceptional contribution to knowledge in their field may be elected to Fellowship of the Academy ...

since 2002.

Early life and education

Pauline Yvonne Ladiges was born in

Bolton Bolton (, locally ) is a large town in Greater Manchester in North West England, formerly a part of Lancashire. A former mill town, Bolton has been a production centre for textiles since Flemish weavers settled in the area in the 14th ...

, England in 1948. She was educated at the

, completing a Diploma of Education in 1971 and a Master of Science the following year for her thesis, "A population study of ''Eucalyptus viminalis''". In 1976 she graduated with a PhD from the same university for her thesis, "Studies of population differentiation in ''Eucalyptus viminalis'' Labill., in relation to mineral nutrition and drought resistance".

Career

Pauline Ladiges began her career as a

plant ecologist Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution and abundance (ecology), abundance of plants, the effects of environmental factors upon the abundance of plants, and the interactions among and between plants and other ...

, and continued with this work from 1974 to 1983. The next phase of her work was in

phylogenetic systematics Cladistics (; ) is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups ("clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived chara ...

and

Eucalyptus ''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, including '' Corymbia'', they are commonly known as e ...

are found in many different environments across Australia, and have a long and complex evolutionary history. Pauline Ladiges was the first to use advanced methodologies to define the relationships between the major groups of Eucalyptus, particularly by employing these two techniques: # cladistic analyses of taxonomic series # molecular techniques for estimating relationships between and among genera. The education of students in science at secondary and tertiary levels has been supported by her work throughout her career. At the same time as she was completing her Master of Science at the University of Melbourne, she undertook a Diploma in Education, and served her first year as a bonded teacher in a secondment to a Teacher's College. She has taught and supervised a very large number of postgraduate students throughout her career. As head of the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne she worked to address the deficit of skilled taxonomists in Australia by creating links with an important user of botanical knowledge, the

Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria are botanic gardens across two sites–Melbourne and Cranbourne. Melbourne Gardens was founded in 1846 when land was reserved on the south side of the Yarra River for a new botanic garden. It extends across ...

, an initiative acknowledged with a commendation in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Knowledge Transfer Awards. (She is deputy chair of the Royal Botanic Gardens and served as a board member for 14 years.)

Awards

* 2001: Centenary Medal "for service to Australian society and science in the biogeography and ecology of Australian plants" * 2002: Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA) * 2005: Royal Society of Victoria 2005 Research Medal (biological sciences, nonhuman); Award for Excellence in Australian Publishing, Single Title Category * 2009: Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), "for service to the advancement of botanical science and research in the field of taxonomy and plant systematics, and to the conservation of Australian flora and fauna" * 2011: Nancy T. Burbidge Medal, Australasian Systematic Botany Society ( This award is presented annually for outstanding contribution to taxonomic and systematic botanical work in Australia.)

Publications (selected)

Educational texts

* ''Biology: an Australian focus'' / Pauline Ladiges, University of Melbourne, Barbara Evans, University of British Columbia, Robert Saint, University of Melbourne and Bruce Knox. 4th ed. North Ryde, N.S.W.: McGraw-Hill, 2010 * Evans, B. K., Ladiges, P., McKenzie, J., & Sanders, Y. (2005). ''Heinemann Biology 1''. Port Melbourne: Pearson. * Biology two: survival mechanisms, continuity and change / Barbara K. Evans, Pauline Y. Ladiges, John A. McKenzie. Barbara K. Evans. 2nd ed. Reprinted with corrections. Port Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1995

References