James Orr

James is an ecologist interested in how stressors impact the diversity, stability, and functioning of ecological communities. He is particularly interested in the interactions between species that lead to complex dynamics and in the interactions between multiple stressors that make predicting global change impacts so challenging. He uses a combination of mathematical theory, experimental ecology, and research synthesis in his work. Although much of James' research focuses on fundamental questions in population and community ecology, he is also interested in applied questions in the fields of global change biology, (freshwater) environmental science, and microbiology.

Before joining UQ, James did his PhD at Trinity College Dublin and he then worked for three years as a postdoctroal research at the University of Oxford. In 2024 he was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council to study how the temporal synchronization of antibiotics and phages impacts the ecology of bacterial communities and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. He is based in Dr. Andrew Letten's microbial ecology lab in the School of the Enviornment (room 262).