Dr Jane Melville has been conducting research on the ecology, evolution and genetics of reptiles and amphibians for more than 17 years. She undertook her PhD on the evolution of Tasmanian snow skinks at the University of Tasmanian, before moving to the USA to take up a postdoctoral research position. At Washington University St Louis, in Prof. Jonathan Losos’s lab, she studied the evolution of desert agamid and iguanid lizards. She was particularly interested to see if similar evolutionary patterns could be seen in the Australian and North American deserts – known as convergent evolution. This research led to an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Prof. Rick Shine’s lab at the University of Sydney and the project was expanded to include deserts in South America, Central Asia and Africa.
Since commencing work at Museum Victoria, Dr Melville’s research has combined field studies with a variety of genetic analyses to study population biology, systematics, evolutionary ecology, and speciation in reptiles and amphibians. Currently, her research focuses on revising the taxonomy of agamid lizards by integrating genetic and morphological information. Other projects include investigating the impacts of habitat disturbance, particularly the recent Victorian bushfires, on frog populations in the Kinglake region and the impacts of habitat fragmentation on diversity of immune-system genes (MHC) in box-ironbark woodland birds. She is also running other genetics projects aimed at the conservation of endangered reptiles, such as the Striped Legless Lizard, which lives in Victorian grasslands.