Rate My Professor Jan Strugnell

Professor Jan Strugnell is a Promotional Chair at James Cook University. She completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours at James Cook University and a DPhil in Zoology at the University of Oxford, supported by a Rhodes Scholarship. Following her doctorate, she held postdoctoral research fellow positions at Queen’s University Belfast, the British Antarctic Survey, and the University of Cambridge, where her work focused on evolutionary relationships among Antarctic and deep-sea octopods. She subsequently held academic appointments at La Trobe University before returning to James Cook University, where she serves as Director of the Centre for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture and leads the Marine Omics laboratory.

Strugnell investigates the evolution and function of marine organisms through genomic and transcriptomic approaches. Her research addresses both applied and fundamental questions, including population differentiation, adaptation, resilience to temperature stress, range shifts, and molecular evolution in the context of past climatic and geological changes. She has received the James Cook University Outstanding Alumni Award and multiple Australian Research Council grants. Key research outputs include studies on cephalopod phylogenetics and Antarctic marine invertebrates. Strugnell contributes to editorial roles and supervises postgraduate research in marine biology and aquaculture.