Presented at the Annual ASPAB conference, Townsville, 11th November 2009.

Professor Margaret Clayton has been a leader in brown algal research in the southern hemisphere including Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica for more than thirty years. She has worked on phaeophycean taxonomy and aspects of physiology, chemistry and ecology but her life history studies are perhaps her most important legacy. Her work on the reproductive biology and physiology of marine algae resulted in significant advances. In recent years the Poles have attracted her, and she has worked on Antarctic and Arctic brown algae.

Margaret is a meticulous researcher and cautious in her conclusions. She has published over 90 refereed articles and book chapters, co-edited two textbooks, and co-authored two books, the most notable being with Robert King 'Marine Botany: An Australian Perspective'.

Margaret graduated with a PhD from Melbourne University, and began her career in 1973 when she took up a position as a junior lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne.  She worked at Monash for 33 years, eventually becoming Head of the School of Biological Sciences between 1994 and 2002, before being appointed Deputy Dean of the Science faculty and the faculty's Associate Dean (Research). Her students included Alecia Bellgrove, Martina Doblin and Karen Kevecordes. In 2005 she was awarded an inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Equity and Diversity Award for her work across the university towards achieving equity for women at Monash.

In 2006 Margaret moved to Canberra to take up a position with the Australian Research Council as Executive Director of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, overseeing grants to the biological sciences, from which she retired earlier this year.

Margaret was involved with ASPAB from the beginning – she famously stated in the second issue of Michael Borowitzka’s Australian Aquatic Botany Newsletter in 1978 ‘If we don’t do something now about forming a society – we never will’.  Luckily for us they did, and ASPAB was formed in 1979.

Margaret will be remembered for her article with Ian Price (James Cook University) in the second ASPAB newsletter -  ‘Many phycologists have problems with sex in algae’. By1984 she was Editor of the Newsletter, and she was President of ASPAB from 1991 to 1994. She also made a great contribution to International Phycological Congresses - she was on the Organizing Committee for some years and was a key person in the organization of the highly successful IPC at Monash in 1988.