I received my PhD in zoology from the University of Queensland in 1975, and followed this with a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship with the mathematical ecologist, E C Pielou, at Dalhousie University in Canada. I then took a Queen's Fellowship in Marine Science at the University of Sydney with L C Birch.

In 1977, I was appointed as the inaugural lecturer in ecology at the University of Wollongong, and I followed this with a stint as a science and technology analyst at the Office of National Assessments in Canberra.

I moved to the Australian Institute in Marine Science in Townsville in 1980 where I led the Marine Systems Group, leaving in 1990 to become Director of the National Resource Information Centre of the Bureau of Resource Sciences in Canberra.

In 2000, I left the (renamed) Bureau of Rural Sciences (after stints as Chief Scientist, Chief of the Science Secretariat, and Chief of the Division of Fisheries and Forestry Sciences) to join the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra as a Visiting Fellow.

As well as my appointment at the ANU, I currently hold adjunct appointments as a Principal Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, and as an Adjunct Professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Queensland.

I established Tjurunga Pty Ltd - a practice in the science of complexity - in 2001 with the mission of bringing the fruits of complexity research to the worlds of business and government.

My research interests during all this period have been in the area now known as 'complex systems'. In fact, I first became interested in complex systems as a graduate student in the early 70s after reading Richard Levin's classic 1970 paper of that name. It has informed my thinking ever since. My first published efforts in community ecology in the late 70s reflected this interest, and even included the phrase 'complex systems' in their titles, much to the confusion of my colleagues.

Since then, I have helped pioneer the use in ecology - particularly coral reef ecology, and especially the ecology of the crown-of-thorns starfish - of numerical classification (1977), adaptive algorithms (1978), fractals (1983), learning algorithms (1983), catastrophe theory (1985), chaos theory (1985), formal grammars (1986), nonlinear non-Euclidean modelling (1988), cellular automata (1990) and Volterra-Hamilton systems (1996). This work has been driven by a desire to understand the dynamics of complex systems in all their richness.

At the present time, I am actively exploring the use of complex systems tools and ideas in the area where economics and ecology intersect - sustainable development - and steadily broadening my reach from the natural sciences into the social sciences.

Publications

Roger Bradbury's publications cover a wide range of subjects including: public policy; sustainable development; ecology especially theoretical ecology and population dynamics; complex systems theory especially the theory of complex adaptive systems; philosophy of science; information technology especially data and metadata issues, high performance computing and geographic information systems; and modelling and simulation especially adaptive and learning approaches.

• Roger Bradbury's publications - complete list of papers and talks
• Tjurunga on complexity - an annotated list of articles on understanding complexity