draubenheimer

David is an expert in nutritional ecology – the study of how nutrition influences animals in their everyday lives.

He has worked with a large number of different species, from insects and spiders to fish, birds, grizzly bears, giant pandas, elephants, snow leopards, gorillas, orangutans and humans and … yes … the kakapo.

He has co-invented a new approach to understanding animal nutrition, called nutritional geometry. This has provided new insights into many important unsolved problems, from the factors that drive human-wildlife conflict, to the role of nutrition in accelerating or delaying ageing and the cause of the human obesity epidemic.

He has also used nutritional geometry to develop a new understanding of the factors that drive reproduction in the kakapo, which has formed the basis for redesigning supplementary feeds used in the management of this species.

David holds the Leonard P. Ullman professorship in Nutritional Ecology, and heads the Nutrition Theme at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. He has published over 270 scientific papers and book chapters, and is co-author of the book The Nature of Nutrition: a Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

October 2016