Dr John Hooper - Queensland Museum Staff
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BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD. Postdoctoral fellowships at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, and British Museum (Natural History), London; and recipient of a Churchill Fellowship (1988) for work on marine sponges. Adjunct Professor Natural Products Discovery Griffith University, Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Integrative Biology, The University of Queensland. |
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Biographical Info: |
Dr Hooper’s professional career as a marine biologist spans 25 years, primarily working in natural history museums in Darwin, Paris and Brisbane, with expertise in benthic biodiversity in general, and the Phylum Porifera in particular. He commenced work on sponges in the western and northwest Australian and Southeast Asian faunas, and subsequently throughout the western Pacific rim and the Pacific islands, and currently also in the western Indian Ocean. Dr Hooper is recognised as an international authority on marine sponges (Phylum Porifera), with specific research interest in systematics, biogeography and chemotaxonomy of Porifera, and biodiversity of sessile marine invertebrates & marine conservation in general. In 1987 he began collaborating with ‘biodiscovery’ agencies who were attempting to discover new therapeutic pharmaceutical products from marine organisms, from which significant discoveries in marine biodiversity have since eventuated. His involvement with this program commenced initially with the US National Cancer Institute’s collaboration at James Cook University, and subsequently with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Coral Reef Research Foundation, IRD Centre de Noumea, Natural Products Discovery Griffith University, Marine Chemistry Group University of Utah and Institute of Marine Sciences University of Dar es Salaam, as well as smaller-scale ongoing collaborations with Chulalongkorn University Thailand, University of the South Pacific Fiji, National University of Singapore, Kitasato University Japan, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry University of Oklahoma, University of California, Davis, Department of Marine Sciences University of The Ryukyus, Cancer Research Institute, Arizona State University, and Universitas Udayana Bali Indonesia (to name only the more prominent). These collaborations have enabled Dr Hooper to survey, document and describe the marine sponge biodiversity throughout tropical Australasia and the Indo-west Pacific, contributing substantially to the discovery of over 4000 species of sponges from the Australasian region – most new to science – more than tripling our previous estimates of sessile marine invertebrate diversity. His main field of expertise concerns taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, biodiversity and conservation biology of sponges (Porifera), having described over 600 new species, 10 new genera, 2 new families and suborders, and revised the status, nomenclature and systematics of over 4000 nominal taxa of sponges during the period 1977-2007. From this work he has published 150 scientific (peer-reviewed) papers in international journals and books, including three co-authored books and four monographs, as well as many other popular articles, technical and management reports. The most recent significant publication is a co-authored and co-edited two volume book on sponge systematics (‘Systema Porifera. A guide to the classification of sponges’) published by Kluwer Academic Plenum Publishers, New York (now Springer). He has won over 35 grants from competitive agencies, academic and industry sources, and has participated in more than 50 consultancies with government, academic, commercial and industrial agencies, many international. In addition to taxonomic and biodiscovery research pursuits he was also a Task Investigator for the recent CRC Reef’s ambitious Mapping By-catch & Seabed Benthos Assemblages in the GBR Region for Environmental Risk Assessment & Sustainable Management of the Queensland East Coast Trawl Fishery, and CRC Torres Straits Torres Strait Seabed Biodiversity Mapping’ - Seabed mapping and characterisation of key biotic & physical attributes of the Torres Strait ecosystem’.
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