Colleen Higgins

Colleen Michele Higgins is a New Zealand academic plant pathologist, and is a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology, specialising in plant viruses and environmental microbiology. Higgins won an award for her teaching in 2013, for a course she developed on ethics and emerging health and biological technologies.

Academic career

Higgins completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours in plant molecular pathology at the University of Queensland and a PhD titled HLA-B27 and related genes in the aetiopathogenesis of ankylosing spondylitis at University College London. Higgins returned to studying plants, and undertook postdoctoral research on viral evolution and genetically modified crops at CSIRO, the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. Higgins developed a postgraduate paper on ethics and emerging health and biological technologies. She has served as vice-president of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society.

Selected works