Associate Prof Grant Williamson

Associate Professor Grant Williamson is a landscape and fire ecologist and spatial analyst. He completed his doctorate at the University of Adelaide, studying the impact of fine-scaled rainfall regime across a climate gradient on adaption in native Australian grasses. He took up a post-doctoral position at Charles Darwin University in an ARC-linkage project studying the impact of mosquito control measures on mosquito-borne disease on humans, and the ecology of the mangrove swamps in which they breed. Grant moved to the University of Tasmania in 2008 and took up a post-doctoral position on the ARC-linkage Biomass Smoke Project, continuing his interest in the nexus between human health and ecology, studying the impact of smoke pollution from landscape fire on human health, and developing predictive models for smoke exposure.

During his career at the University of Tasmania, Grant was part of the NERP Landscapes and Policy hub, researching landscape-scale human-ecological interactions in the Australian Alps and Tasmanian Midlands. Grant received a post-doctoral scholarship from the Centre for Air Quality & Health Research and Evaluation at the University of Sydney (CAR-CRE)in 2014 to continue his work studying human exposure to smoke pollution from landscape fires, and is currently a research fellow working with the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, developing modelling tools to understand fire history and how Australian fire regimes and vegetation will shift under climate change, and to improve prescribed burn planning.