Pauline Ladiges

Pauline Yvonne Ladiges AO PhD FAA is a botanist whose contributions have been significant both in building the field of taxonomy, ecology and historical biogeography of Australian plants, particularly Eucalypts and flora, and in science education at all levels. She is Professorial Fellow in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne, 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 since 2002. The standard author abbreviation Ladiges is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.

Pauline Ladiges began her career as a plant ecologist, and continued with this work from 1974 to 1983.

The next phase of her work was in phylogenetic systematics and historical biogeography. Eucalyptus 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:

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, 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.)

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