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Joan Leach is Acting Provost and Senior Vice-President at the Australian National University. She leads the academic mission set out in ºÚÁÏÌìÌÃby 2030 – to discover for the nation, educate for leadership and convene for consequence – and the academic decision-making that underpins it.

Joan joined ºÚÁÏÌìÌÃin 2016 to direct the national Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, the first science communication centre in Australia, and led it until the start of 2025 – building it into the largest science communication research centre in the country and one of the leading centres of its kind internationally. She then served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), where her work focused on student pathways, enrolment and retention, and equity of access.

Joan chaired the Academic Board from 2020 to 2024 and has served on Council as a non-voting member. She has also been Acting Dean of the College of Science. Academic freedom and university governance are long-standing interests.

Her research examines how scientific knowledge travels between science and its publics, and what makes that exchange ethical. Her books include An Ethics of Science Communication, written with Fabien Medvecky, and the co-edited Communicating Science: A Global Perspective, a history of the field drawing on 39 countries. She was Executive Editor of the journal Social Epistemology for nine years and has supervised more than 30 PhD students and hundreds of coursework and research students.

Joan advises the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on science communication and is an author on a joint FAO and International Science Council white paper on science communication for public good. She is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Training Centre for Accelerated Future Crops Development and in the Medical Research Future Fund Project, Ethical Governance of Australian Stem Cell Lines. She continues to publish on how patients and publics can help govern stem cell research, and on ethics and public engagement in astronomy, including how astronomers work with Indigenous communities near observatory sites.

She is a past President of the Australian Science Communicators, past Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Australian Academy of Science, and a founding member of the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology. She has held an Andrew Mellon Fellowship, was the Dorothy Hodgkin lecturer in Science and Society at the British Academy for the Advancement of Science, and Purdue University awarded her a science laureateship for services to public engagement with science.

Before ANU, Joan held academic positions at Imperial College London, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Queensland.