Rate My Professor Jaco Le Roux

Jaco Le Roux is an Extraordinary Associate Professor in the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University. He joined Macquarie University’s Department of Biological Sciences in July 2018, where he serves as Professor in the School of Natural Sciences. He is an evolutionary biologist and molecular ecologist with a background in botany, microbiology, population genetics, and phylogeography. His research focuses on the population dynamics of invasive species, plant evolutionary biology and biogeography, and plant-microbial interactions. Specific interests include the phylogeography and population genetic structure and diversity of invasive plants, extreme long-distance dispersal in explaining historically disjunct distributions, the dynamics of plant-bacterial interaction networks, soil microbial community diversity and functional responses to plant community compositional changes, and plant evolutionary biology.

He completed a BSc in Microbiology at the University of Pretoria in 1999, followed by a BSc(Hons) in Microbiology in 2001 on root-nodule symbionts of soybean in South Africa, and an MSc in Microbiology in 2003 on the diversity of root-nodule symbionts of the genus Lotononis, both at the University of Pretoria. He earned his PhD in Botany from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007, with a thesis on the phylogeography and population genetics of invasive plants in the Hawaiian Islands. He holds an external appointment as Extraordinary Associate Professor at Stellenbosch University since July 2018. His professional email address is jaco.leroux@mq.edu.au.