Ralph Slatyer

Ralph Owen Slatyer AO FAA (16 April 1929 – 26 July 2012) was an Australian ecologist, and the first Chief Scientist of Australia from 1989 to 1992.

He was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1929, and was educated at Perth Modern School and Wesley College, Perth, then the University of Western Australia from which he graduated with Bachelor’s (1951) Master’s (1955) and Doctoral (1960) degrees in agricultural science.

In 1951, he joined the Division of Land Research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), becoming Associate Chief of that division in 1966. In 1967, he left the CSIRO and became a Professor of Biology at the Australian National University in Canberra. While at ANU, Slatyer travelled twice to the United States where he worked as a Visiting Professor at Duke University (1963–64) and the University of California (1973–74). In the United States, he was appointed a Senior Fellow of both the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In March 1975 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society