Professor Libby Lester has taken up the role of Professor (Research) and Director of the Monash Climate Change Communications Hub, joining us from the University of Tasmania, where she was the UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment and Heritage, and Director of the Institute for Social Change.

Professor Lester’s work is focused on understanding and promoting the role of communications and media in good decision making about shared social and environmental futures, and she is recognised internationally for her research on environmental communications. She has published seven books and more than one hundred journal articles and chapters. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.

For more than a decade, Professor Lester worked as a journalist, reporting on social, political and environmental issues for major Australian newspapers and magazines, including The Age and Good Weekend, and continues to write and produce journalism. She has degrees from ANU (Prehistory and Physical Geography) and University of Melbourne (Media and Communications).

At Monash, Professor Lester will build on her recent Australian Research Council-funded research which asks how communities, industries and politics adapt in the face of climate change and land degradation, and expanding networks of communications, travel and trade within the Australia-Asia region. She also coordinates multi-disciplinary partnerships with government to support immediate and longer-term decisions by providing useful, evidence-based and timely information about environments and communities in times of change and stress.