SPEAKERS

Karen Gowlett-Holmes

Born in England in 1959, Karen migrated to Australia with her family in 1965, and lived for many years in Adelaide, South Australia, where she attended school and college, graduating from the University of Adelaide in 1980 with a BSc in botany and zoology. Her love of the sea grew from regular childhood fishing trips with her father, where she spent as much time investigating the myriad forms of marine animals and plants on the beach and collecting shells as she did actually fishing. A keen snorkeller as a child, Karen started SCUBA diving in 1976, and has since logged over 3,000 hours underwater.

Continuing her childhood fascination with marine life into a career, Karen is now a leading Australian marine biologist, and has worked in this field for over 25 years. She has published over 40 scientific papers, books, book chapters and popular articles. In addition to SCUBA diving, she also spends considerable time at sea on research and commercial fishing vessels, studying deep-sea marine life. While Karen has traveled to many tropical areas with her work, her first love is the diverse cold-temperate waters of southern Australia and New Zealand, and she is now based in Tasmania.

Karen was the Collection Manager of Marine Invertebrates at the South Australian Museum for 12 years, and since 1995 has been employed part-time as the Invertebrate Collection Manager at the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Tasmania. She spends the rest of her time as a freelance photographer/biologist, including many consultancies with nature documentary productions.

Karen is a recognized expert in the identification and classification of benthic invertebrate animals, particularly molluscs, and is an internationally recognized expert on chitons (a class of molluscs). She has been pursuing underwater photography professionally since 1991, specializing in macro-photography, particularly of invertebrates, but also of plants and benthic fishes. Via painstaking collection of specimens and working closely with other experts in the field, Karen's catalogue of marine photographs are accurately identified down to species where possible, and covers all macro marine invertebrate phyla. Karen regards her photography as an extension of her scientific research, and as way of showing people the beauty of some of the less well-known marine life. Karen is a current member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP), and was awarded her Master of Photography by the Institute in 2003. She has also won many national and international prizes for her photography.

She has produced a series of marine life postcards, posters and marine life ID cards that are sold throughout Australia, has been published in many books and magazines worldwide, and is currently writing a series of Australian regional marine invertebrate field guides featuring her photographs. She has been involved in fieldwork from Antarctica to the deserts of central Australia, including diving in coastal regions of Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and New Guinea, and research at sea on commercial fishing and research vessels in the Antarctic, Southern Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arafura Sea, Great Australian Bight and Tasman Sea.