Biography
Professor Stephen Simpson is Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre, a University of Sydney cross-faculty initiative aimed at researching and implementing cross-disciplinary approaches to alleviating the burden of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and related conditions. He is also the Executive Director of Obesity Australia.
After completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, he pursued a PhD at the University of London. Professor Simpson spent 22 years at the University of Oxford, first in Experimental Psychology, then in the Department of Zoology and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
He returned to Australia in 2005 as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellow, then ARC Laureate Fellow. In 2007 Professor Simpson was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London as “one of the world’s foremost entomologists and nutritional biologists”.
In 2015 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia "for eminent service to biological and biomedical science." In 2022 he was awarded the Macfarlane Burnett Medal by the Australian Academy of Science.