Meet our new team members!

Paul Melloy is dedicated to simplifying on-farm decision-making by translating pest and disease risk models into spatial decision-support tools.  He is working across two projects, PestREADI for the horticultural industry and Canola Allies for the grains industry. His role on these projects is to develop an online spatial platform to assist farming communities in structuring rural landscapes and coordinating management strategies, while encouraging beneficial insect populations. This aims to reduce the dependency on chemical interventions and create more resilient and profitable farming communities into the future. Paul’s passion for spatial data spills into his hobbies where he likes to undertake “nerdy running” at orienteering and rogaine events. He also likes hiking and mountain biking while spending time camping in the Australian outback and bush.

Jessa Thurman is focused on the contributions of arthropod natural enemies to pest control on farms, and how farming practices impact the provision of these ecosystem services. Her PhD, which was completed last year at the University of Queensland, focused on which natural enemies ate or parasitised a major economic pest, the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella), and how this pest control varied across crop season and spatially throughout the crop. She is now working on the Canola Allies project to develop and test tools to optimise the deployment of biological control agents like parasitoid wasps in Canola. This involves simulation modelling to predict pest populations and the contributions of wasps to managing those populations. She has a passion for studying insect ecology and sharing the secret lives of invertebrates with others, which has culminated in her children’s book, Australia’s Incredible Insects.