Professor Steve Simpson is the inaugural Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre and Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney.

After graduating as a biologist from the University of Queensland, Steve undertook his PhD at the University of London, then spent 22 years at Oxford before returning to Australia in 2005 as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, then ARC Laureate Fellow.

Steve and David Raubenheimer have developed an integrative modelling framework for nutrition (the Geometric Framework), which was devised and tested using insects and has since been applied to a wide range of organisms, from slime moulds to humans, and problems, from aquaculture and conservation biology to the dietary causes of human obesity and ageing. Steve has also pioneered understanding of swarming in locusts, with research spanning neurochemical events within the brains of individual locusts to continental-scale mass migration.

Steve and David have co-authored many hundreds of peer reviewed papers and two books: The Nature of Nutrition (Simpson & Raubenheimer, 2012, Princeton University Press) and Eat Like the Animals (Raubenheimer & Simpson, 2022, HarperCollins)

In 2007 Steve was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, in 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, in 2015 was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, and in 2022 he was awarded the Macfarlane Burnet Medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences.

Steve is also Executive Director of Obesity Australia and has been prominent in the media, including presenting a four-part documentary series for ABC TV, “Great Southern Land”.