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. She was also a senior scientist working on Botrytis cinerea at a New Zealand biotechnology company. Higgins then joined the faculty of the School of Applied Sciences at Auckland University of Technology in 2004, rising to full professor in 2024. Higgins developed a postgraduate paper on ethics and emerging health and biological technologies. In 2013, Higgins was awarded a Academic Excellence in Teaching Award by AUT. She has served as Vice-President of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society.

Higgins's research covers diagnosis of plant viruses, viral diversity and evolution, and interactions between viruses and host plants. She uses molecular biology techniques to study the susceptibility of plants to viruses in crop plants and native New Zealand plants. She also studies bacterial genomics and taxonomy.