Kevin Thiele

I'm a systematist and taxonomist, a past Director of the Western Australian Herbarium, past Chair of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, and currently an independent scientist trading under the name Eubio Consulting. After a PhD at Melbourne University, where I worked on an early cladistic analysis of Banksia, I took up a post-doctoral position under Judy West at the Australian National Herbarium, working on a Flora of Australia treatment of Rhamnaceae. My wife and I then eschewed gainful employ and took our small but growing family to a small, off-grid farmlet in a remote and utterly beautiful part of East Gippsland, where we lived and worked for 12 years growing vegetables, raising children, helping out at the local school, and continuing our research work into, amongst other things, the conservation of grassy box woodlands, the taxonomy of Viola, and development of the Lucid suite of software tools. Another major change of lifestyle, occasioned by the children reaching high school age, saw us move to Perth and, for me, the position leading the WA Herbarium for a decade. My current work includes teaching systematics and evolution at the University of Western Australia, the taxonomy of Hibbertia in Western Australia, building an identification key to all Australian flowering plants, and working towards the Decadal Plan for Biosystematics and Taxonomy in Australasia.