Rate My Professor Ross Crates

Dr Ross Crates is a Research Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. He completed a BSc with first class honours in Ecology at the University of East Anglia in 2006. After graduating, he worked for three and a half years as a research assistant at the Edward Grey Institute of Ornithology at the University of Oxford, contributing to a large-scale project on the social evolution of songbirds. He later completed a PhD at the Australian National University focused on the ecology and conservation of the critically endangered regent honeyeater, developing a new monitoring program to identify factors driving its disproportionate population decline due to habitat loss.

Crates is a member of the Difficult Bird Research Group at ANU. His research interests centre on ecology, evolution and conservation with a primary focus on birds. Since completing his PhD, he has led projects on the management of noisy miners in high-conservation areas, the conservation of threatened species including the King Island scrubtit and brown thornbill, mistletoe population dynamics, animal cultures, and improvements to captive breeding and reintroduction programs. He manages national monitoring programs for the regent honeyeater and swift parrot. His work contributes to understanding and mitigating threats to woodland birds and other threatened avian species.