Prof Damian Barrett

Dr Damian Barrett is Research Director of the Energy Resources Program in CSIRO Energy and Director of the CSIRO ‘Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance’ (GISERA). He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland.

Dr Barrett has over 30 years research experience in CSIRO, the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Greenhouse Accounting, eWater CRC and The University of Queensland.

Dr Barrett graduated with a PhD from the Australian National University in 1993. He was a CSIRO Plant Industry Post-Doctoral Fellow between 1993 and 1994 and a Carnegie-Melon Foundation Visiting Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, USA, in 1995. From 1996 to 2003, Dr Barrett worked in the CSIRO Climate Change Science Program and CRC Greenhouse Accounting on continental scale coupled models of the carbon and water cycle. Between 2004 and 2008, Dr. Barrett was appointed Research Stream Leader of the Environmental Remote Sensing Group in CSIRO Land and Water. He was also Principal Investigator of the NASA ‘Carbon, Water and Energy Fluxes of Tropical Savannas’ Project. In July 2008, Dr Barrett was appointed Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland, and was Director of the Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry between 2009 and 2012. He returned to CSIRO in 2012 where his research interests have focussed on environmental issues associated with the mining and petroleum sectors.

Dr Barrett has presented at more than 40 national and international workshops and conferences in the last 10 years on topics as diverse as water availability forecasting, the global terrestrial carbon cycle and greenhouse gas mitigation, satellite modelling of water and carbon cycles, human impacts and global change, sustainability, mining and biodiversity, and water management in the resources sector. He has published more than 120 refereed papers, been cited more than 3700 times and has a H-index of 28. Dr Barrett’s research interests include environmental biophysics, mathematical inverse modelling, physical hydrology, ecosystem services and sustainable development.