I am in the 1st year of my PhD at UNE. I completed my undergraduate at UNE, with a major in Zoology and minor in Ecology. I also completed my Honours year at UNE, under the co-supervision of Dr. Nigel Andrew (UNE), Dr. Saul Cunningham (CSIRO) and Dr. Heloise Gibb (La Trobe). I was lucky enough to be able to experience what research would be like as early as my 3rd year of my BSc, as I devised and carried out my own scientific project. I currently have a scientific journal article from this project under review with an Australian journal. Currently, I am also working on writing up my Honours research for publication.
For my PhD, I will investigate food-webs of cereal and legume crops across an environmental gradient in north-west NSW, examining the effects of (A) climate change, (B) habitat fragmentation and (C) insecticide use. I will specifically assess the cereal-aphid-parasitoid and legume-pollinator interactions in terms of these three (A, B, C) anthropogenic modifications. I am currently conducting the 1st stage of field work, looking at these interactions on a small scale on a group of properties north of Moree, NSW. This is to better understand these interactions, which are relatively poorly researched in Australia, before studying them across a much larger regional gradient in the north-west of NSW. I also plan to later incorporate green house experiments to assess the influences of climatic variation upon these interactions (ie: temperature, water and carbon dioxide levels are three important variables I wish to assess).
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