ProfDavid Suggett

David Suggett is highly-cited marine biologist interested in understanding how environments and climate shape the form and functioning of coral reef ecosystems.

A Professor in the Climate Change Cluster at UTS, David increasingly works alongside industry and tourism sectors to improve reef management tools and practices, and his work was recognised in 2020 with a UTS Medal for Research Impact.

Within the Climate Change Cluster, he leads the Future Reefs Program, where the research ranges from organism-scale molecular signatures to broad scale ecological interactions. The outcomes directly inform how corals grow and survive, how reefs will look and function into the future, and how to better preserve and re-build healthy reefs.

David has coordinated the first scalable coral propagation program on the Great Barrier Reef, integrating activity of the tour operator industry under the Coral Nurture Program, to develop novel reef rehabilitation capacity. The program is a new approach for the Great Barrier Reef, initiated by a world-first partnership between tourism and science.

David chairs the field-based propagation working group for the international Coral Restoration Consortium, comprised of scientists, managers, coral restoration practitioners and educators dedicated to enabling coral reef ecosystems to survive long term.

He is also Vice President of the world’s oldest organization concerned with the study and conservation of coral reefs, the Australian Coral Reef Society.

A major focus of his work continues to be unlocking how “active fluorescence” can be used to monitor and manage the health of oceans and reefs, and he currently co-leads a working group for the Scientific Committee for Ocean Research (SCOR) on this topic.

Prior to joining UTS as an ARC Future Fellow, David was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and then lecturer in Marine Biogeochemistry (University of Essex, UK), working on reefs in Brazil, Seychelles, Indonesia, New Caledonia and the Red Sea.