Marilyn Renfree facts for kids

Marilyn Bernice Renfree (born 19 April 1947) is a famous Australian zoologist. A zoologist is a scientist who studies animals. She is known for her amazing research on marsupials, like kangaroos and wallabies.

Since 1991, Renfree has been a Professor of Zoology at the University of Melbourne. Her work has helped us understand how marsupials have babies and raise their young.

Early Life and School

Marilyn Renfree was born in Brisbane, Queensland. Her family later moved to Canberra. She went to Canberra Girls' Grammar School, where she studied many subjects, including biology.

After high school, Renfree studied biology at the Australian National University. She especially loved learning about biochemistry and how animals reproduce. For her special final-year project, she studied the tammar wallaby. To do this, she had to invent a new way to catch female wallabies on Kangaroo Island so she could study them.

A Career Studying Marsupials

For her PhD project, Renfree studied how mother marsupials and their developing babies, called embryos, interact.

Amazing Discoveries

One of her biggest discoveries was about something called embryonic diapause. This is like a "pause button" for pregnancy, where an embryo stops growing for a while. Renfree found that she could "un-pause" the embryo and let it grow into a baby by giving the mother wallaby injections of a hormone called progesterone.

She also proved that marsupials have a placenta, just like other mammals. The placenta is an organ that connects the mother to her developing baby. It helps pass nutrients to the baby and makes important hormones. Her first scientific paper about this was published in the famous journal Nature.

The "Possum Lady"

After finishing her PhD in 1972, Renfree moved to the University of Tennessee in the United States. There, she studied how certain proteins and hormones affect animal pregnancies.

She also started a project on opossums. To find opossums for her research, she put an ad in the local newspaper. Soon, people in the town started calling her the "possum lady from Australia"!

Learning and Teaching in Australia

Renfree later moved to Scotland to learn about genetics at the University of Edinburgh. In 1973, she returned to Australia and became a lecturer at Murdoch University in Perth.

At Murdoch, she started her own colony of tammar wallabies to continue her research. She also studied agile wallabies to understand how marsupials produce milk for their babies, a process called lactation.

In 1982, Renfree moved to Monash University in Melbourne. There, she started her third tammar wallaby colony and spent ten years focused completely on her research.

Filming Wallaby Births

Renfree helped with a TV series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation called The Nature of Australia. The special filming methods they used for the show helped her study how marsupials are born.

She showed that the baby marsupial is not just a passenger. The baby actually helps control its own birth by changing its mother's body chemistry.

Later Career and Achievements

In 1991, Renfree became the Head of the Zoology Department at the University of Melbourne. In 2011, she was a key leader on a project that mapped out the entire DNA of a kangaroo for the first time. This is called genome sequencing.

Renfree has won many awards for her important work. In 2013, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for her amazing research. In 2021, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is one of the highest honours a scientist can receive.

A Woman in Science

When Renfree was young, her father didn't expect her to go to university. But she was determined. After her first year, she earned a scholarship and paid for her own education. Her father was very proud and became her biggest supporter.

At times in her career, she faced challenges for being a woman in a field mostly filled with men. However, she never gave up and became one of the world's leading experts on marsupials. Her story inspires many young scientists today.