Professor Ary Hoffmann AC receiving an Order of Australia (General Division)

Dear Bio21 Community Members,

It is a great pleasure to congratulate Professor Ary Hoffmann, School of Biosciences at Bio21, today with the announcement of an appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia (General Division) in the Australia Day 2022 Honours List.

Ary has been awarded an AC for his eminent service to science, particularly evolutionary biology and ecological genetics, through research, mentoring and education, and to professional scientific organisations.

Ary’s work in the School of Biosciences, Faculty of Science at Bio21 has focused on pest control and environmental stress adaptation, using tools in molecular ecology and genetics. His group undertakes research on a range of invertebrates. They have developed integrated pest control options for the grains and grape/wine industries, investigated how landscape changes can be harnessed to provide pest control services, contributed to novel approaches for suppressing dengue mosquito vectors, and examined new ways to predict species distribution shifts under climate change. He has made seminal contributions to the study of Wolbachia endosymbionts in insects including the discovery of Wolbachia infections in Drosophila, enabling the development of Drosophila as a model system for understanding the population dynamics of Wolbachia. Ary co-leads promising field trials in Australia and Indonesia using Wolbachia-transfected mosquitoes to control the spread of dengue fever.

Ary Hoffmann completed his undergraduate education at the University of Queensland and Monash University, graduating with a BSc(Hons) in 1980. He then undertook PhD at La Trobe, graduating in 1984. Ary completed a postdoc at UC Davis before returning to La Trobe where he started as a Lecturer and attained a personal Chair in 1998. Ary received an ARC Federation Fellowship in 2005 to conduct research at the University of Melbourne.

Ary’s work has been highly impactful with over 60,000 citations, an H-index of 120 with numerous publications in Nature and Science. In 2021 alone his work was cited nearly 7,000 times and he published over 80 papers! Ary was appointed a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2004, is a past ARC Australian Laureate Fellow, past President of the Australian Entomological Society, past President of the Australasian Genetics Society, and visiting Professor at both the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Liverpool. He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He won the Eureka Prize for Infectious Disease Research in 2013. Ary was appointed a University of Melbourne Laureate Professor in 2018.

Ary joins a growing list of former and current Bio21 scientists awarded Order of Australia Honours including Andrew Holmes AC, Colin Masters AO, Eric Reynolds AO, Frances Separovic AO, Karen Day AM, Suzanne Garland AO, and Ute Roessner AM.

Please join me in congratulating Ary! We are proud that you are part of our team at Bio21.

Michael Parker

Director, Bio21 Institute