Geoffrey Playford,^1,*,** Hossein Hashemi,^2,*** Reed Wicander<sup>1,3,**

1</sup>aSchool of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Q 4072, Austral
²bDepartment of Geology, Faculty of Earth Sciences, Kharazmi University, 49 Mofatteh Avenue, Tehran 1
³cDepartment of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI 48859

^*CONTACT Geoffrey Playford g.playford@uq.edu.au
^**Geoffrey Playford – a graduate of the Universities of Western Australia (BSc Hons I, DSc) and Cambridge (PhD) – is a professor emeritus in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland (UQ). While a senior undergraduate at the University of Western Australia, he was introduced to palynology by the inspirational Dr Basil Balme, then newly appointed to the university. Geoff's initial appointment to a lectureship in geology at UQ was preceded by doctoral research at Cambridge (supervised by Dr Norman Hughes) followed by tenure of an NRC postdoctoral research fellowship at the Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa. During periods of sabbatical leave from UQ, he has conducted collaborative research, notably with Dr Francine Martin (Belgium), Dr Colin McGregor (Canada), Prof. Reed Wicander and Merrell Miller (USA), Prof. Marco Tongiorgi (Italy) and, more recently, with Drs Rodolfo Dino and José Henrique Gon¸calves de Melo (Brazil). He has published extensively on a diverse range of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic palynomorphs, with main emphasis on their stratigraphic applications.
^***Hossein Hashemi has been an associate professor in the Department of Geology, Faculty of Earth Sciences, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran since 1999. He obtained his MSc degree from Tehran University in 1990, working on Early Permian palynomorphs from the Alborz Ranges, northern Iran. Awarded a PhD scholarship by the Australian government, he continued research on Palaeozoic palynomorphs under the supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Playford and received his doctoral degree from The University of Queensland in 1997. He is principally interested in the systematics and stratigraphic applications of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic palynomorphs.