Andrew is a research botanist in a joint position between The University of Adelaide and The State Herbarium of South Australia. His research covers various aspects of plant evolution with an emphasis on Australian plants and large phylogenetic studies. Andrew's main research focus is large-scale molecular phylogenetic analyses of plants, across a broad botanical and geographical range. In partnership with collaborators from around the world he has pioneered spatial phylogenetics – a "big data" field that combines large-scale molecular phylogenetics, geospatial information obtained from collection data, and randomisation tests to identify unique areas of phylogenetic diversity and endemism to enable evolutionary, ecological, and biogeographic interpretations of these patterns.

There are currently over 92 million herbarium plant records available to download from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Many of these records reliably represent the native range of each species. However, there are records in GBIF that represent erroneous, naturalised, and cultivated occurrences of species. The Fellowship will support spatial curating that will score the occurrence records of all angiosperm species in GBIF to create a dataset with an extra column indication whether each record is native, naturalised or neither. This dataset will serve as a reliable source of botanical information that other researchers can use for their modelling and diversity analyses.