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Dr Bob Wong

Senior Lecturer

LLB (Hons)
BSc (Hons)
PhD, The Australian National University

Telephone: +61-3-9905-5652
Fax: +61-3-9905-5613
E-mail: bob.wong@sci.monash.edu.au

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Dr Bob Wong
My background
Dr Bob Wong
I was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia when I was six years old. I grew up in Canberra where, as a portly little child, I would sit at home for hours at a time, staring at my collection of tropical fish. At university, I decided to keep my career options open and undertook combined degrees in Science and Law at the Australian National University. After receiving my honours in both, I decided to ditch law, and concentrate on science. With that, I enrolled into a PhD program at the ANU under the joint supervision of Dr. Scott Keogh and Dr. Michael Jennions. For my PhD research, I used the Pacific blue eye, a small freshwater fish from eastern Australia, to address a number of topical issues in sexual selection and speciation theory.

After handing in my PhD thesis in 2003, I was lucky enough to secure a Sir Keith Murdoch Fellowship to carry out a one year postdoc in the USA. I decided to go to Dr. Gil Rosenthal’s lab at the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole where I worked on sexual selection in two species of swordtail fish from Mexico. At the beginning of 2005, after my stint in the US, I headed off to an even colder destination, Finland, to carryout further postdoctoral research under a fellowship funded by the Centre for International Mobility and the Academy of Finland. In Finland, I worked in Dr. Kai Lindstrom’s lab on a range of behavioural projects using the sand goby as my model system. I also had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Hanna Kokko on a theoretical paper and Dr. Ulrika Candolin on a project looking at the impact of algal-induced water turbidity on the honesty of sexual displays in sticklebacks. At the end of 2005, I returned to Australia with the intention of taking up a three year Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dr. Mark Elgar’s laboratory at the University of Melbourne. Two weeks into the fellowship, however, I was offered a lectureship at Monash and started my present position at the beginning of 2006.