UNE Emeritus Professor Dr Klaus Rohde has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the International Biogeography Society
IBS Fellows are chosen based on their "outstanding contributions to the mission of the scientific society through excellence in basic research and/or exceptional service to the field of biogeography".
Dr Rohde's nomination noted his many contributions to marine parasitology, evolutionary ecology and zoogeography, biodiversity, and the phylogeny and ultrastructure of lower invertebrates.
To top off this significant achievement, Dr Rohde recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Colleague and friend, Dr Fritz Geiser from the School of Envrionmental Science, reflects on the scholar's impressive career below.
Klaus Rohde can look back on a stellar career and an eventful and productive life. He was born in Brandenburg near Berlin in March 1932, between the world wars, a tumultuous time in history. Most of his school years were experienced under the Nazi regime and Brandenburg was bombed at the end of the Second World War followed by the Russian occupation. Although his family house, a bakery, was bombed, they survived by hiding in the cellar under benches and after the raids went to live with friends and in bunkers. When the Russians completed the occupation of Brandenburg they moved back to their partially destroyed house with little sustenance, consisting largely of leftover old bread from the bakery. Eventually, life returned to ‘normal’, the schools reopened and he completed his HSC (Abitur) in 1949, early at an age of 17 years because he was an excellent student and had been advanced by a year.
After the HSC he applied to study mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, but was not accepted because of his ‘wrong’ class background and consequently did a 1-year course to become a teacher in Russian. He taught in a small village near Brandenburg, but soon he was offered a place to enrol in Slavic Studies at the Landeshochschule in Potsdam. Once enrolled he managed to change his subjects to those of his interest: Zoology, Botany and Physics. One of his teachers in Potsdam was Konrad Lorenz, the behavioural biologist and 1973 Nobel Laureate. Since the political pressure under Russian occupation was relentless, he and some of his fellow students decided to flee to the west. On his bicycle he crossed into West Berlin in 1953 and from there he flew to West Germany. Initially he was in a refugee camp and worked for a brief period as a farm hand near Stuttgart and then as a deliverer of bread in Baden-Baden where he stayed with relatives.
From 1955 he enrolled in a PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) at the University of Münster (he rode with a bicycle from Baden-Baden to Münster along the Rhine) on the Behaviour of Paramecium, which he completed in 1957. His project was supervised by Berhard Rensch, an eminent German Zoologist. Professor Rensch supported him in obtaining positions as assistant researcher, initially at the Vogelschutzwarte Essen-Bredeney and then in the pharmaceutical industry where he began his work on parasitology by developing tests for the efficacy of anti-worm drugs. After another short position at the Vogelwarte Helgoland in Wilhelmshaven he obtained a Lectureship at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. There he collaborated with Lord Medway on parasites of small mammals, mainly bats, and discovered new genera and subfamilies of trematode worms. Despite the excellent working conditions in Kuala Lumpur he wanted to return to Germany to complete his Habilitation and a severe bout of malaria helped promote that decision. He thus returned to Germany in 1967 to begin his Habilitation at the Ruhr University in Bochum using electron-microscope studies on the ultrastructure of parasites continuing on from his light-microscope work in Kuala Lumpur. As the equipment at the University of Bonn was better suited to his requirements some of the work was conducted there. During this time he established himself as a world leader in the study of the ultrastructure of parasitic worms.
After the completion of his Habilitation in 1970, he was offered a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Queensland. He worked in the Institute of Parasitology at UQ for two years, but during this time he also conducted work on Heron Island where he unravelled some of the complex life cycles of parasitic worms. As the fellowship at UQ was restricted to two years, he applied for new positions, one as director of the Heron Island Research Station and another as Reader at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, which he was offered and he accepted. During his time in Sudan he taught and conducted scientific work at the University’s field station at the Red Sea.
His time in Sudan was brief since he received an offer to become the director of the Heron Island Research Station and he returned to Australia in 1973. During this time he met his future wife Ursula (nee Bremhorst), born in Berlin during the war, who joined him at Heron Island and contributed to the collection of samples. This would sometimes take place during the middle of the night when Klaus scuba dived for fish (not for consumption, but for parasites) which he delivered to a tinny captained by his patiently waiting and sole assistant, Ursula. During his time at Heron Island he also began to work on a pivotal paper: ‘Latitudinal gradients in species diversity: the search of a primary course’, published in Oikos in 1992. This is still one of the top papers in this field now at over 1,700 citations, with citations of >1,000 for scientific papers being rare and exceptional. Klaus also received his D. Sc. from UQ in 1975.
The directorship on Heron Island was restricted to three years, so again he had to apply for positions and was offered a lectureship in the Department of Zoology at UNE in 1976; in 1993 he was made a full professor and received a personal chair. Klaus was one of UNE’s most productive academics ever, with about 400 published papers, 5 sole-author books and editorships of other books. His work is frequently cited with over 13,500 citations and a h-index of 53 (i.e. 53 of his papers have received 53 citations or more) and a i10-index of 237 (i.e. 237 of his papers received 10 or more citations). Klaus was awarded many prizes including the Vice-Chancellors Award of Excellence in Research at UNE and the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of NSW.
On a more personal perspective, Ursula’s and Klaus’ son Peter was born in 1981. Peter was educated in Armidale and at UQ and now is Senior Lecturer in Quantum Computing at UTS in Sydney where he was an ARC Future Fellow until last year. Peter has just published his first book on the Quantum Internet with Cambridge University Press.
Written by Fritz Geiser, March 2022, with the help of Bronwyn McAllan and Peter Rohde.
