Adjunct Professor
Stuart Parsons

Profile image of Adjunct Professor Stuart Parsons

Faculty of Science,
School of Biology & Environmental Science


Personal details

Positions

Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Science,
School of Biology & Environmental Science

Keywords

Animal Behaviour, Bioacoustics, Wildlife Biology, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Bats, Chiroptera, Human-Wildlife Conflict

Research field

Zoology, Ecological Applications, Other Biological Sciences

Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2008

Qualifications

  • PhD (University of Otago)

Professional memberships and associations

Lab Web Page: Walkingbats.com

Teaching

Professor Parsons has a strong commitment to learning as a partnership between staff and student. Both parties share responsibility and rely on one another to achieve effective learning. He enjoys working closely with both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and believe that teaching in small groups is most effective. At undergraduate level this is challenging given the large class sizes, but he overcomes this by encouraging questions from students in class, and by making himself available after each lecture and by appointment at other times He also offers tutorials to all my classes and encourage active participation. Students are encouraged to think about biology in terms of proximate mechanisms and ultimate cause, with a focus on understanding rather than fact-based learning. Prof. Parsons uses assessment mechanism that emphasise this approach such as writing synopses of scientific papers, class debates, semester essays and marks for participation in class discussion. He views postgraduate research students as “partners in science” where student and supervisor are colleagues. As the supervisor he has oversight of the project and provides a mentoring role, while students retain ownership of their project. This approach produces self-reliant, confident and extremely competent science graduates.

Outcomes for Prof. Parsons' students are excellent, with many quickly finding work with environmental consultancies, government research agencies (e.g. New Zealand Department of Conservation, CSIRO) and universities.

Publications

QUT ePrints

For more publications by Stuart, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).

View more publications

Filter publications:

A complete list of publications is available at: https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/stuart.parsons