Draft:Ian Paulsen

Ian T. Paulsen FAA FRSN FASM is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and Director of the Australian Genome Foundry.

Paulsen is a former ARC Laureate Fellow and an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. Paulsen is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society of New South Wales. His research expertise includes membrane transport, microbial genomics, metagenomics, systems biology, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.

Thomson Reuters identified Paulsen as one of the World's 3000 Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. He was also featured in The Australian as one of the top forty research superstars in Australia in 2020. He co-founded the Joint Academic Microbiology Seminars (JAMS) and the national synthetic biology organisation Synthetic Biology Australasia, advocating for microbiology and becoming a mentor for the next generation of synthetic biologists.

Career and Impact
Paulsen started his research career with a PhD in Microbiology from Monash University in 1994 and was an NHMRC C.J. Martin Fellow at the University of California in San Diego. In the early days of his academic career, he studied the biological mechanisms of multiple drug resistance to antibiotics. From 2000-2007, he held a faculty position at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Maryland, USA, where he led many microbial genome sequencing projects. Paulsen returned to Australia in 2007 as a Professor at Macquarie University and received a Life Science Research Award from the NSW Office of Science and Medical Research that same year. In 2014 he was awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship for studying marine bacteria and their importance in the marine food web. In the same year he was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor from Macquarie University in recognition of his work in genomics, systems biology and environmental microbiology.

He founded the Synthetic Biology Laboratory at Macquarie University and He then became founding Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology at Macquarie University, funded in 2020. In parallel, Paulsen leads the Australian Genome Foundry, a high-throughput biofoundry.

Paulsen is the co-leader of the Australian node of the Sc2.0 (Yeast 2.0) project, which has successfully synthesised all 16 native chromosomes to produce the world’s first synthetic eukaryote, a version of common baker’s yeast - Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Paulsen has published over 350 papers, has over 106,300 citations and has an h-index of 133 (Google Scholar, July 2024).

Media
Paulsen’s genomic sequencing research was reported in the New York Times. His synthetic biology research has been reported in the Washington Post. His work on the Yeast 2.0 project has been reported in ABC News. He is also featured in articles appearing on Open Access Government and InnovationAus.com.

Awards and Fellowships
2020 Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science

2018 Fellowship of the Australian Society for Microbiology

2016 Fellow, Royal Society of New South Wales

2014 Australian Research Council (ARC) Australian Laureate Fellow

2014 Research Excellence Award from Macquarie University

2014 Distinguished Professor at Macquarie University

2007-2011 Life Science Research Award from NSW Office of Science and Medical Research

1995-1999 C.J. Martin Fellowship, National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia

1990-1994 Sir Ernest Field Memorial Scholarship