Michelle Devlin
Email: michelle.devlin@jcu.edu.au
Phone: 07 4781 5050
Location: DB019 116B
Michelle has been working on tropical and temperate marine ecosystems for the past 14 years. She specialises in environmental monitoring of water quality and eutrophication and the provision of regulatory advice on eutrophication. She has been project manager for national and international research and monitoring programs on fate and consequence of pollutants in the freshwater, coastal and offshore marine waters, and establishing links between the freshwater zone and marine system and coastal zone management.
Michelle started work at ACTFR many years ago before moving to Australian Institute of Marine Science, where she worked as part of the long term monitoring team involved in the water quality monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef. She moved onto the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, where she spent 6 years in the Research and Monitoring section, managing long term monitoring projects, water quality and catchment issues, and flood plume studies. Michelle then took a break when she was awarded the LWRDDC international fellowship investigate international long term monitoring programs that deliver real and pertinent information in the management of watershed activities and coral reef systems. The fellowship took her to many different places (Florida, Maryland (Chesapeake Bay), Guelph (Canada) and London (UK), to identify mechanisms of knowledge exchange, and programs which have been successful in transferring this information into policy and successful environmental outcomes.
After the fellowship, Michelle took a job at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Centre in the United Kingdom where she was extensively involved in the development of ecological assessments for European Waters for six years. Michelle worked on a number of different European Union, World Bank and UK contracts, looking at ways to integrate eutrophication indicators across marine waters.
She has now returned to the ACTFR, where she is working in the Marine Impacts/Catchment to Reef group.
She has extensive experience of designing, implementing and evaluating monitoring programmes to assess environmental impacts of human activity on the marine and coastal zone. Michelle has worked around the world, including Kuwait, Georgia, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, France, Florida and Ontario, Canada.
She has worked in water quality issues on the Great Barrier Reef, including event monitoring of flood plumes for 6 years. She has authored and co-authored over 30 scientific reports and papers and is a qualified diver. She has a degree in applied biology, a masters and PhD awarded from James Cook University. Her thesis included research on the spatial and temporal patterns in flood plumes in the Great Barrier Reef
