Stephen completed a BSc with honours in aquatic biology at Brown University in 1991. After working for a year as a research assistant at Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, he returned to university to undertake doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Robert Warner at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Stephen was awarded a PhD in March 2001 for his dissertation: “Self-recruitment in Coral Reef Fish Populations”.

Stephen joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne in January 2001 where he ran the Research on the Ecology and Evolution of Fishes (REEF) lab. He was promoted to full professor in 2014 and was the Director of the National Centre for Coasts and Climate (2016-2023). He joined the University of Western Australia in February 2024 as the inaugural Jock Clough Marine Foundation Oceans Chair.

Jock Clough Marine Foundation Oceans Chair

Member, Research Leadership Group, Oceans Institute

Co-lead, Living Shorelines Australia

Associate Editor, Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review

Fish and fisheries ecology

Early life history

Dispersal and movement ecology

Habitat restoration

Nature-based coastal protection

Ecologically beneficial aquaculture

Improving the effectiveness of marine habitat restoration

Improving the success of hybrid living shorelines for coastal protection

Developing and validating novel methods to estimate age- and size-at-maturity in South Eastern Australian fisheries

Restoring golden kelp forests on rocky reefs in Port Phillip Bay

Impacts of artificial light at night on temperate and tropical reefs