“As a conservation scientist, my work is making a difference in the world and that’s very important to me. I want to have a career that is about passion and about something that I believe makes a real difference. I think that being a scientist makes you approach life with objectivity and that the training as a scientist helps you learn how to read, critique, and think about how the natural world works. I get excited about the basic discoveries that we make with the endangered species that we work with and by the complexities of the biologies of these individual species. When I first started this work, I thought that after a few years of studying one species that you would learn so much about it that you would know what you need to know to help conserve it. I have realized that you could spend a lifetime studying some of these species and still continue to learn more and more about them and their interactions with pollinators and soil microbes and all of these other complexities that are happening in the real world that to me are so fascinating.”
Interviewed by Rachel Becknell
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