I am from the small town Douglas in the heart of the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, Canada. It was here in the rivers, streams and marshes of Renfrew County that I first thought I wanted to be a biologist - it was as a volunteer in Costa Rica in 1991 with Youth Challenge International that I knew. My research today is informed by, and about, each place. I obtained a B.Sc. (Hons) and an M.Sc. (1998) in Biology from Trent University in Peterborough Ontario, and then moved to Montreal, Quebec for my Ph.D. (2004) at McGill University. I received an FQAR Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Quebec provincial government that I took to the University of Guelph, and in 2008 was hired as an assistant professor in Molecular Ecology at the University of Guelph. As a biologist, it is important to me to work in both the field and laboratory to integrate field and molecular biology into questions of ecological and evolutionary importance to conservation. I am currently working on multiple projects that examine how biodiversity and phylogenetic community structure are changed across natural and anthropogenic gradients, the co-evolutionary ecology of host/parasitoid/symbiont relationships and the phylogeography of both insects and amphibians.