Profile

I live in Edinburgh and have a tiny garden to grow vegetables; every spring I wait with bated breath to see if the seeds I plant germinate, and every year, I get ridiculously excited when they do. I feel perennially guilty that I haven’t identified all the lichens growing on the paving stones nearby… I am proud to be a muddy-boots naturalist, but wish I knew more bird calls than I do. I miss the USA terribly and its huge, wide-open spaces and wildnernesses, and one day want to take my UK family on a road trip to experience some of that — including a warm ocean to swim in!

I am lucky that in my work I get to do research, teach and – hopefully! – inspire people, and do my small part to use my knowledge to help nature conservation. My research is focused on the diversity of lichens – fungi that live in cooperation with their own food source that they grow inside their bodies (algae, usually). Some of the quetions I have tried to answer include: Who are those algae inside lichens? How do the fungi inside lichens evolve and can we identify them just by their looks? How far do lichens travel when they reproduce? A typical research project involves going to a lichen-rich place – think mountains or rainforests in the UK (yes, we do have rainforests in the UK, and they are amazing!) – learning the lichens there and where the special ones grow, making some collections, and bringing these back to use microscopy, sequencing and other DNA-type tools for identifying them, either to species or even to gene-pool. I almost always get to work with really clever people to build on my own skills, so I learn a lot from them, which is great. One of my favourite projects was collecting and identifying lichens from old roofs – from before the Industrial Revolution, to see how lichen communities and climate has changed over time.

My job is incredibly varied. I might be in a classroom teaching about fungi or lichens, I might be running a meeting from my computer about lichen conservation, or I might be outside finding out what lichens live in a special woodland or an city park. I live for days in ‘the field’, when I put on warm clothes and tough boots, climb a mountain or explore a forest, and get to spend hours looking at all the tiny things that are all around us but often not seen. Usually, when I go to the field, I collect pieces of what I find so that I can bring them home to identify using chemicals or microscopes, or even using their DNA. I feel equally home in a lab or just with a ruler and a clipboard gathering data in the field. Most days, someone will ask me to identify something they found for them, and I enjoy helping with those queries.