Rachel commenced her PhD at the University of Queensland in February 2018, and is supervised by Professor Richard Fuller. She is keen to investigate changes in human-nature interactions across time and space in tropical cities, and its relationship with local biodiversity and impact on conservation concern.
Rachel holds a Masters (2014) and Degree (2012) from the National University of Singapore, during which she spent a large amount of time as a treehugger. She has mucked around abandoned aquaculture ponds and mangroves in Sulawesi (Indonesia) doing mangrove rehabilitation , and has investigated niche preferences of trees and seedlings in forests on American Samoa.
Email: rachelohry@gmail.com
Location: Rm 506, Goddard Building 8
Twitter: twitter.com/rachelohry
Broadly, Rachel is passionate about conducting applied and inter-disciplinary research and enjoys a balance of fieldwork and (mindful)-keyboard-prodding. She is trained as an ecologist and her envisaged research outcomes are to improve the management and conservation of natural ecosystems. Prior to moving to Australia, Rachel was a researcher with the National Parks Board of Singapore and is still collaborating on projects that utilise: (i) Next-Generation-Sequencing to characterise avian population structure to inform efforts of restituting connectivity and gene flow corridors; (ii) genomic methods to investigate the ancestry and admixture of Red Junglefowl; (iii) urban climate models to improve outdoor thermal comfort and mitigate Urban Heat Island; and (iv) experiments to distil the pathways between biodiversity and subjective well-being.