Rebecca Hamilton

Dr. Rebecca Hamilton serves as a Lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, where she joined in 2023. She maintains dual affiliations as a Member of both the Sydney Environment Institute and Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her academic trajectory includes research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany (2020-2023) and the Australian National University in Canberra (2017-2019), establishing her expertise at the intersection of physical and social sciences.

Her research program centers on two interconnected pillars: (1) employing palaeoecology to investigate landscape responses to climate, fire, and human disturbance across tropical Asia and Australia over timescales from decades to millions of years; and (2) conducting historical ecology research focused on socio-ecological data mapping to reconstruct how shifting social perspectives influence landscape expression through time. This work directly supports the University's research strengths in Understanding Life on Earth, Climate and Environmental Change, Biodiversity Conservation, and Sustainability, with explicit aims to inform contemporary decision-making for planetary habitability.

Dr. Hamilton coordinates the Master of Environment Science program while teaching foundational courses including GEOS1001: Earth, Environment and Society; GEOS2111: Hazards, Climate Change & Disasters; and ENVI3888: Environmental Studies Project. Her current research initiatives include PANTROPOCENE: Finding a Pre-Industrial, Pan-tropical 'Anthropocene', which investigates long-term human-environment interactions across tropical regions. Analysis of her recent publications reveals consistent focus on tropical environmental dynamics, methodological innovation in paleoenvironmental reconstruction, and critical examination of the Anthropocene concept through interdisciplinary lenses.

She has secured research funding including the 2023 Faculty of Science Startup Scheme grant for 'Tracing human footprints in the Anthropocene'. Her scholarly impact extends to public discourse through media features in Mongabay, East Asia Forum, and The Conversation, where she has contributed perspectives on Southeast Asian forest diversity, Asia's poultry industry, critiques of 'pristine wilderness' concepts, and Sydney's wetland conservation history.

Dr. Hamilton currently supervises four research students pursuing diverse projects: James BAKIS (Holocene environmental reconstruction in Australian high country), Emma KOCH (World Heritage cultural landscapes in Australia), Sonia SU (Legal-geography of marine conservation in Taiwan), and Yihan WANG (Paleoecological reconstruction of Sydney Basin conservation baselines). Her collaborative research network spans institutions globally, emphasizing the integration of long-term environmental data with contemporary sustainability challenges.