Biography

Geoff McFadden took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Melbourne.  He made two trips to Antarctica to study sea ice algae while completing a PhD in the Botany School, University of Melbourne in 1984.  He then took up a three year postdoctoral position in algal cell biology in Muenster, Germany.  Geoff returned to Australia on a prestigious QEII Fellowship in 1987 to join Prof Adrienne Clarke’s Plant Cell Biology Research Centre, where he worked on the molecular biology of barley and tobacco.  He subsequently received an ARC Senior Research Fellowship then a Professorial Research Fellowship to investigate the origin of chloroplasts by endosymbiosis.  In 1995 Geoff spent a year at the Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Canada.  He became an ARC Federation Fellow in 2009 and is now an ARC Laureate Professor in the School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne.  

Geoff identified the relict chloroplast in malaria parasites and is unravelling what the relict chloroplast does and how it can be targeted with antimalarial drugs.  He has published 270 papers, many in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, Current Biology, EMBO J, and PNAS.  He has 46 papers with more than 100 citations, 26,000 career citations, and an h-index of 82.  Geoff has been awarded the Goldacre Medal, the Australian Academy of Science's Frederick White Prize, two Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar’s awards, The David Syme Medal, two Woodward Medals for excellence in Science & Technology, the Julian Wells Medal, the Miescher-Ishida Prize, the Royal Society of Victoria Medal, The Ramaciotti Medal, The Ralph Slatyer Medal, and is a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Australian Society of Parasitology, and a Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology. 

Geoff’s PhD students have also received prestigious awards such as a Victoria Fellowship, a Peter Doherty Fellowship, three CJ Martin Fellowships and the Premier’s Prize for medical research in recent years. 

Geoff is interested in 1950’s American cars, keeping bees, old motorbikes, making wooden surfboards and riding them.