21 Facts About Richard Shine

Richard Shine is currently a Professor of Biology at Macquarie University, and an Emeritus Professor at The University of Sydney.

Richard Shine attended schools in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, and completed his university studies at the Australian National University with an Honours degree in zoology in 1971.

Richard Shine's PhD was obtained from the University of New England in Armidale, under the supervision of Professor Harold F Heatwole, and dealt with the field ecology of Australian venomous snakes.

Richard Shine began working on broader questions in evolutionary biology, collaboratively with another student, James J Bull, currently a Professor in Biology at the University of Idaho.

Richard Shine returned to Australia to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Sydney in 1978, and was appointed to a lectureship at that institution in 1980.

Richard Shine became a Research Associate of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1988.

Richard Shine was appointed to a Professorship at the University of Sydney in 2003, having relinquished undergraduate teaching to concentrate on research and graduate training in 2002, under fellowships from the Australian Research Council.

Richard Shine dissected thousands of preserved snakes in museum collections to document basic natural history patterns of hundreds of species from Australia, the Pacific, and southern Africa.

The research then extended to new methods for toad control, and Richard Shine found that the cannibalistic nature of cane toad tadpoles can be turned against them.

Richard Shine suggested a new method of buffering the impact of cane toads on vulnerable native predators, by releasing small cane toads at the invasion front.

Richard Shine continues to conduct ecological and evolutionary research on reptiles and amphibians, with an emphasis on developing new tools for conservation.

Richard Shine received Whitley Awards from the Royal Zoological Society of NSW for all three of his books.

Richard Shine was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2003, and appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia in 2005.

Richard Shine was awarded a second Eureka Prize in 2011, and a third Eureka Prize in 2013.

Richard Shine is the only person to have won three Eureka Prizes in different categories.

Richard Shine won the NSW Science and Engineering Award for Plant and Animal Research in 2011, and in the same year, his research team won the Environment section of the inaugural Australian Innovation Challenge Awards.

In 2012 Richard Shine was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and the same organisation presented him with the Robert Whittaker Distinguished Ecologist Award in 2014.

Richard Shine's work was profiled by the magazine Science in June 2012.

In 2015 Richard Shine was elected to presidency of the world's largest scientific herpetological society, the Society for The Study of Amphibians and Reptiles.

Richard Shine was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales in 2015.

Richard Shine was elected to fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and a festschrift to honour his career was held at the World Congress of Herpetology in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2020.