Professor Gurr is an ecologist who has held a range of senior leadership positions including Associate Dean Research, and Director of the Rural Management Research Institute at the University of Sydney; and Sub-Dean, and a six-month acting period as Head of Campus, at Charles Sturt University. Following doctoral training at Imperial College and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, his work over the last three decades has focused on developing ecologically-based strategies to harmonise agriculture with the environment.

He won Engagement Australia’s excellence award for Outstanding Research Engagement in 2020 for adoption across tens of thousands of farms of the approaches he pioneered, policy change in China, changed practices in Australian cotton and forestry industries, and a new plant protection product based on plant compounds. Such work has been the subject of two of the three books for which he was senior editor and many of his more than 200 scientific papers that include Nature Plants, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, PNAS and Annual Review of Entomology. Collectively, these papers have been cited over eight thousand times, giving him an H-index of 45. In 2020 and 2021 he was named as the nation’s top researcher for ‘Insects & Arthropods’ in The Australian special reports. His work has been supported by multiple grants from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, as well as a range of rural research and development corporations, CRCs and international donors such as the McKnight Foundation. Awarded research funding has a combined value of close to $20 million.

He has also researched and published in the field of student supervision and successfully completed 43 PhD and MPhil students. He has held faculty positions at Melbourne, New England, Sydney and Charles Sturt as well as visiting professor positions at Sydney, Lincoln University in New Zealand, Zhejiang University and Fujian Agriculture & Forestry University in China. His work in China has been supported by a prestigious 'Thousand Talents' fellowship. He is immediate past President of the International Organisation for Biological Control (Asia Pacific) and Fellow of the Royal Society NSW and the Royal Entomological Society.