Professor Richard Ellis CBE FAA FRS, Corresponding Member – awarded the Royal Medal A from the Royal Society for motivating numerous advances in telescopes and instrumentation, and exploiting these facilities to revolutionise the understanding of cosmological evolution.
30 September 1925 to 22 August 2022
Dr Alec Costin was an international authority on the ecology of high mountain and high latitude ecosystems, elected to the Academy in 1980. His studies provided a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the Australasian high-altitude biota and of the contemporary distribution and successional patterns of the major plant and animal communities. As part of this work, Dr Costin made a unique contribution to historical biogeography, where he developed an absolute chronology of late Quaternary events in south-eastern Australia. He made major contributions to the flora of the Snowy Mountains area. These investigations, together with his research in hydrology, geomorphology and conservation also had a substantial influence on public awareness and government policies concerning many aspects of conservation and environmental management.
In the mid-1940s, while at the University of Sydney, Dr Costin accepted an honours placement to study in the Australian Alps. In the early 1950s his research took him interstate and overseas until 1955. During a visit to the Kosciuszko region to see how the Snowy Hydro Scheme was progressing after its first years of construction, Dr Costin noticed degradation in the area. He approached Dr Ian Clunies Ross (then Chair of CSIRO in Melbourne), who offered him a position with CSIRO’s Division of Plant Industry to investigate the relations between vegetation and water yield in the Snowy Mountains. Following a 19-year career at CSIRO, Dr Costin was made a visiting fellow at the Australian National University until 1977.
Dr Costin gave his time generously to the Academy, including over two decades of service prior to his election as a Fellow. He served on several National Committees for Science and on Academy committees.
Dr Costin was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1986. In 1988 he was awarded the McKell Medal for outstanding work in land and water conservation in Australia, and in 2001 Alec was awarded the Centenary Medal.
In 2006, Dr Costin was interviewed for the Academy’s Conversations with Australian Scientists, during which he recounted the story of Professor Frank Fenner and his team catching rabbits in the high country to take back to Canberra in the mid-1950s.
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