Lisa Schwanz

Associate Professor Lisa Schwanz is an evolutionary ecologist at the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on phenotypic plasticity, temperature-dependent sex determination, and climate change adaptation in vertebrates, particularly reptiles and mammals. She holds a B.A. (Honors) from the University of California, Berkeley (2000) and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico (2006).

Her work explores how environmental factors like temperature influence reproductive ecology, parental effects, and thermal biology. Recent publications emphasize developmental plasticity in thermal tolerance, moisture effects on reptilian phenotypes, and acclimation strategies in fluctuating environments. She collaborates widely on meta-analyses and comparative studies, contributing to frameworks for biological data curation.

Grants include the ARC Discovery Project DP170101147 ("Sex determination in dragons: genetics, epigenetics, and environment"). She supervises Ph.D. students in thermal ecology, sex allocation, and invasive species dynamics, and teaches courses on arid ecosystems (BIOS3161) and animal behavior (BIOS3011).