Profile

I’m pretty crafty! I know how to cross-stitch, embroider, knit, and crochet. I can draw- but only dragons. I love to read, too, and my favorite genre is fantasy or adventure. I read a lot of Warriors (yes, the cats) and Wings of Fire (more dragons) as a kid, and I still read the new Wings of Fire books.

I’m also a big gamer, and my favorite genre is metroidvanias- things like Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight, mostly for the world exploration. Open-world RPGs like Skyrim and Minecraft are classics, too. My favorite game of all time is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky.

I also love to hike, although my knees desperately wish I wouldn’t (am I old or did I play too much basketball?). My favorite kind of hike is just a good walk through the woods.

Fun fact: even though I study plants, I’m not actually very good at growing them. I do have some houseplants, though.

I’m studying six species (types) of willow. They’re all montane, meaning they only grow high on mountains. They used to be a lot more common in Scotland and formed a habitat called montane willow scrub, with lots of willow bushes on the sides of mountains, but after a lot of sheep and deer eating a lot of willows for a long time, they’re now pretty rare.

I’ll be seeing how often they hybridize, which is when two different types of willow breed/reproduce. If you’ve heard of a zorse (zebra/horse), mule (donkey/horse) or liger (lion/tiger), those are all hybrids- a mix of two species! I’ll also be looking at one species called the Downy Willow and seeing how genetically diverse it is- looking at the DNA of a lot of downy willows to see how different they all are.

I’m hoping that my work will help conservationists, people who help keep wild plants and animals healthy, make good decisions about how to protect these willows! I also just think it’s pretty cool.

Sometimes, I’ll take a walk in the afternoon and go look at some willows we have planted at the Botanics in Edinburgh. I’ll eventually have to do field work where I go into the highlands and collect some leaves for my research, so it’s important I know how to tell each species apart. Other times, I’ll go to the library or herbarium (basically a plant library) to look something up.

I mentioned that I leave work at a different time each day. Being a PhD student is a little weird because there’s not really a schedule to follow as long as you’re getting your work done. Sometimes I’m not very busy, so I’ll leave early, but other times I’ll have a lot to do and need to stay late or keep working at home. It just depends!