Petra is the Director of Future Earth Australia, based at the Australian Academy of Sciences, which is part of the global Future Earth network. She is also the incoming Director for the International Science Council Asia Pacific focal point and will commence in that role in January 2023. In her role, she actively promotes and works across disciplines, including indigenous knowledge, civil society, industry, and government to establish an interconnected platform of expertise capable of forming solutions to national and global sustainability challenges.

Petra has close to 30 years of experience working across academia, government, and the not-for-profit sector, all with a common thread of promoting evidence-based climate action and solutions to environmental and societal sustainability challenges. With a passion for incentivising collaborations around scientific solutions to global environmental challenges, she has always gravitated toward roles at the intersection of science, conservation, innovation, and impact. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular ecology and has spent many years working on issues relating to the impacts of climate change on coral reef-related socio-ecological systems.