INVITED SPEAKERS

Prof Charlie Veron

Corals of the World

Charlie was the first full-time scientist to work on the Great Barrier Reef and the inaugural scientist employed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). He was appointed Chief Scientist of AIMS in 1997, a role he held for seven years. In 2007, he left AIMS to focus more broadly on corals, climate change, and reef conservation.

He has been interviewed more than 300 times and has played a central role in 34 documentary and media productions, including Australian Story (ABC, 2021), The Reef (HBO, 2020), The Magnitude of All Things (2020), and Chasing Coral (2017). His publication record includes approximately 100 scientific outputs, comprising 16 books and monographs spanning coral palaeontology, taxonomy, biogeography, physiology, and molecular science.

Beyond coral biology, he has published extensively on evolution and mass extinctions and is the founder of the globally recognised reference resource www.coralsoftheworld.org launched in 2016 and updated in 2026). Among his most influential works are his memoir A Life Underwater (Penguin, 2017) and Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific (1993).

Most recently, this lifetime of research culminated in the Review of Coral Taxonomy, Evolution and Diversity (2025), in which Charlie synthesises decades of global work to articulate his understanding of coral systematics and evolutionary history, informed by a career spanning field observation, taxonomy and theory.