I am a community ecologist, interested in the complex interactions that occur among plants and microbial symbionts in natural systems, and how global change agents affect these interactions. I gained my PhD from the University of Montana, where I combined molecular and field data to understand interactions at the root-soil interface and how they affect broader scale community-level processes in temperate grasslands. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Bio-Protection Research Centre at Lincoln University, focused on plant-microbial interactions in diseased forests.