Student Representative
Running feral on a farm in the countryside throughout my childhood guided by my horticulturist mum set the stage for a captivation with the natural world around me. My pursuit to study invertebrates as a career only started towards the end of my undergraduate degree in Zoology at Sussex University, where an internship the summer before my final year with the Laboratory of Social Insects, primarily focused on pollinator spillover, led into a dissertation on the impacts of diet on commercial bumblebee health and immunity. During, my master’s degree in Global Ecology and Conservation at Cardiff university I had to opportunity to learn and apply molecular methods to the study of invertebrates in my thesis focused on temporal impacts to biocontrol agents.
Now, I am particularly interested in the intersection of network ecology and molecular biology and how this can be used to further our understanding of invertebrate interactions. Hence, I am now investigating predator-plant commensalisms as indirect drivers of ecosystem services in my PhD at Newcastle university.
