Hannah Buckley

Hannah Buckley is a New Zealand ecologist, professor, and Head of School of Science at Auckland University of Technology, specialising in biological variation in community ecological diversity through time and space.

Academic career

Buckley completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours at Victoria University of Wellington and then a PhD titled Structure of vascular plant, epiphytic lichen, ground beetle (Carabidae), and diatom (Bacillariophyceae) communities in south-central Alberta, Canada at the University of Alberta. Buckley completed postdoctoral work at Florida State University, where she worked on ecological variation in communities inside pitcher plants across North America. Buckley then joined the faculty of Lincoln University, where she rose to associate professor. During this time she was awarded a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University, where she and her husband Brad Case researched spatial patterns in co-occurrence of species in forest plots with Aaron Ellison.

Buckley then moved to the Auckland University of Technology, becoming Head of School of Science in March, 2020, and Professor of Ecology in 2022. She is a lead investigator in the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge.

Buckley is an ecologist, who investigate biological variation over time and space. She also studies gender in science, finding that editor's selection of reviewers for papers submitted to the New Zealand Journal of Ecology showed a gender bias: "Although the effect of associate editor gender on the selection rate of female versus male reviewers was not strong, there was nonetheless a trend for female editors to select more female reviewers than did male editors, suggesting that editors could probably improve female selection rates on the whole."

Selected works