April 24, 2019

Emeritus Professorship awarded to world renowned biologist

Tony Hulbert reflects on a remarkable career. 

\Professor Tony Hulbert’s career was partly decided by a bus timetable. When he left Narrabeen Boys’ High School at just 16 years old, Professor Hulbert had a choice of two universities and was planning to enrol at both. His decision over which university to enrol at first was made purely on which bus came first. He ran out of time and didn’t enrol at the second university.

“I ended up going to the University of NSW because that bus came first,” Professor Hulbert said.

“So my first bit of advice is take advantage of the ‘chance’ events that come your way. You never know where they will lead you.”

That opportunity set Professor Hulbert on a path that has seen him achieve remarkable milestones in his career as one of the world’s renowned biological researchers and teachers. On Wednesday 24 April, he received an Emeritus Professorship from the University of Wollongong during the afternoon graduation ceremony.

“I had a Teachers’ College scholarship and was obliged to do all science-related subjects. Biology at high school was considered a girls’ subject in those days. I had never done biology but I did it in my first year and majored in zoology,” he said.

“In my third year of university I did a subject called comparative physiology and it opened up the world for me. I discovered that the breath a bird takes in doesn’t come out in the next exhalation (as it does in us) but instead comes out two exhalations later. Birds have a different way of breathing to us, one that is more efficient at extracting oxygen from the air. This partly explains why birds can fly over the Himalayas or the Andes, while we generally need oxygen tanks to reach the top of such high mountains.

“It was like opening up an area of aesthetics or beauty of the world and it makes you a bit more humble.”

With the encouragement of his lecturer, Professor Hulbert says he decided to continue his studies with an Honours year, a tough decision for the 19-year-old who was by then newly married, expecting his first child, and indentured through his teachers’ scholarship to either start his teaching career or pay back his scholarship.

“I was the first in my family to go to university and my parents didn’t understand why I wanted to continue to study rather than start working,” he said.

At the suggestion of his lecturer, Terry Dawson, Professor Hulbert took on a project looking at the metabolic rate of marsupials, which resulted in a paper being published in the pre-eminent science journal, Nature.

“More importantly, that project made me go back into the literature and read work that had been done by people many years before. You hear these stories of a boy going to ballet for the first time and realising that was what he was destined to do. To me that realisation came sitting in a library reading a paper by a Danish scientist, August Krogh, the father, of modern comparative physiology. It was the study of how animals work, written in 1916 about the metabolism of different animals.

“I enjoyed it so much, I decided that it was what I wanted to do and hopefully half-a-century later someone would be sitting in a library reading my work.”

From that point on, Prof Hulbert’s career continued to blossom. After a post-doctoral degree in the United States (funded by CSIRO) he came back to Australia in 1975 when the University of Wollongong became an independent offshoot from the UNSW and was appointed as lecturer in its newly established Department of Biology.

“Apart from a few periods of teaching and studying overseas I have been at the University of Wollongong since then,” he said.

In fact, Professor Hulbert has achieved significant milestones, including spending research time at University of California Irvine, Stanford University, Columbia University, as well as Cambridge University, University College London, and the Spanish Research Council.

He has been awarded a Doctorate of Science from the University of NSW (2002), the Brenda Ryman Fellow at Cambridge University (1998), Underwood Fellow at University College London (2002), Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship (2005), and the Clarke Medal for distinguished research in zoology by the Royal Society of NSW (2006).

He has also been published in more than 140 journals including more than 27 reviews. Since 2000, these include invited reviews in Biological Reviews, Annual Review of Physiology, Physiological Reviews, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Journal of Experimental Biology, and Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care. He was an Associate Editor of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology and an editorial board member for the Journal of Comparative Physiology.

“I’ve researched everything from fruit flies to kangaroos. I like to understand how animals work and use that understanding of the natural laboratory of evolution to understand things.”

Professor Hulbert’s most current research is into in the role of membrane lipids in determining the metabolic rate and the lifespan of animals.

“I am especially interested in the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fats in the diet and their role in the development of insulin resistance and obesity,” he said.

Throughout his career Professor Hulbert said one of the best pieces of advice he could give to any student is to not just learn things, but try to understand them.

“We can never predict where the next discovery is going to lead us,” he said.

“The desire for ‘understanding’ makes you search for the very basis of the phenomena you are investigating. It makes you ask deeper questions.”