Amanda Pettersen

Dr Amanda Pettersen is a Lecturer in Ecology at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on phylogeny and comparative analysis, animal physiological ecology, comparative physiology, animal physiology - biophysics, community ecology, marine and estuarine ecology, microbial ecology, and ecology. She completed her PhD in evolutionary ecology at Monash University in 2018. She then spent two years at Lund University, Sweden on a Wenner Gren Postdoctoral Fellowship before returning to Australia to work as a Research Associate at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. Amanda undertook a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Research Fellowship between The University of Sydney and University of Glasgow and a Research Associate position at the University of Tasmania, before returning to The University of Sydney.

Amanda K Pettersen is an evolutionary ecologist whose research focuses on marine ecology, maternal effects, thermal adaptation, and life-history theory. Her work explores how metabolic rate varies across species and environments, linking metabolic scaling with life-history strategies. Pettersen investigates the impacts of temperature on biological responses, particularly in ectothermic animals, and examines how maternal influences shape offspring performance and survival. Her studies also address the ecological and evolutionary consequences of offspring size variation, including its relationship with temperature and metabolic costs. Through interdisciplinary approaches, she integrates ecological, physiological, and evolutionary perspectives to understand how organisms adapt to environmental change.