I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental Science at the University of Galway. My work focuses on host-parasite interactions and dynamics in the context of environmental change. I was awarded a PhD in Biology in 2019 from McGill University in Montréal, where I studied how factors at different scales influenced Gyrodactylus dynamics in fish. For this work I was awarded a Post-Graduate Scholarship and a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian National Sciences and Engineering Research Council. I continued postdoctoral training at McGill, first in the department of Clinical Epidemiology and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre and then in the department of Biology. In 2021, I was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship form the European Commission to move to the University of Basel in Switzerland, where I studied how various factors shaped Daphnia-Pasteuria interactions and seasonal dynamics. In September 2024 I started her own lab at the University of Galway.

Environmental change, biodiversity loss and emerging infectious diseases are three of the greatest global challenges of our times, with significant impacts on ecosystem health and conservation, human health and wellbeing, resource availability, economies and societies. Further complicating the issue is that these challenges all significantly influence each other. Thus, my research interests focus on explaining eco-evolutionary parasite dynamics at multiple levels of analysis (community, metapopulation, population and individual) in response to environmental influences including abiotic, biotic and social factors. My academic background has been interdisciplinary and collaborative as I believe an integrated approach is necessary to tackle these multidimensional problems, and I use a combination of experimental, observational, and theoretical work in my research program. I have specifically contributed to our understanding of how host defence against parasites , sex and gender, nutrient enrichment, metacommunity structure, and temperature influence disease and aquatic community dynamics. I am currently exploring how selection for resistance shapes epidemics, and virulence-density trade-offs for environmentally transmitted parasites. I have explored these questions mainly in fish (guppy-Gyrodactylus ) and zooplankton (Daphnia-Pasteuria ) aquatic host-parasite model systems.

My goal as an educator is to instill not only an interest in my course subject in my students, but an ability to think creatively and independently about the world around them and to make connections outside of the classroom. I am interested in teaching the next generation of ecologists and conservation scientists through an interdisciplinary lens in order better approach the complex challenges we face. During my PhD at McGill, I taught a range of undergraduate courses from introductory Molecular and Organismal Biology and Ecology and Evolution to more advanced Parasitology, and during my postdoc at the University of Basel, I taught an introductory Biology course as well as supervised Zoology "Block Course" projects. I have also delivered invited guest lectures for high-level undergraduate/Master’s ecology courses at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. In my current role at the University of Galway, I teach into a range of Environmental Science and Zoology courses in areas of my research expertise.