Tom Kompas is a Professor of Environmental Economics and Biosecurity in the School of Biosciences and the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is also the the Foundation Director of the Australian Centre for Biosecurity and Environmental Economics (ACBEE) at the Australian National University (ANU), one of three Chief Investigator’s in the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) and Group Director of the Centre for Environmental and Economic Research (CEER) at the University of Melbourne. He has dedicated much of his recent time and work to public policy in Australia. Until recently, he was a part-time Senior Economist at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), a Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities (CERF) project leader on biosecurity and Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
Tom’s research specialises in large-dimensional economic modelling for trade and climate change, cost-benefit analysis and natural resource and environmental economics. His bioeconomic modelling and biosecurity research has been published in the world’s leading international journals (including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, Nature Climate Change, Political Analysis, Fish and Fisheries, Journal of Agricultural Economics, Earth’s Future, Environmental Modelling and Software, World Development, Economic Modelling, Conservation Letters, Water Resources Research, Ecological Applications, Scientific Reports, Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology), and his current work focuses on natural resource management and major biosecurity and climate change issues in Australia and internationally. In 2009, Tom received the ‘CSIRO Medal for Research Achievement’, in 2004, the ‘Crawford Award for Research Excellence’ from ABARE, and in 2011 the ‘Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation’. In 2015, Tom became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and was the Director of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU from 2009 to 2015. He has recently been named as a Distinguished Fellow of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.