I grew up in Bridgend, South Wales where I attended Brynteg School. I studied Biological Sciences at St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, and then did a PhD on the population ecology of butterflies at the University of Leeds. I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, The Natural History Museum (London) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama) before returning to Oxford. I have been Fellow and Tutor in Biology at Brasenose since October 2007. I am also Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biology, where my research group studies the factors maintaining and threatening biodiversity. I have a particular fondness for insects.

I teach in all years of the MBiol course, mostly ecology, entomology and conservation biology, and I supervise students for 4th year Masters research projects. Each year I also run a field course in Tropical Forest Ecology in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

I am an entomologist, community ecologist and conservation biologist studying the processes that maintain, structure and threaten biodiversity in a range of terrestrial ecosystems, but with a special focus on tropical rainforests.

Areas of current research include approaches to reconcile human land-use with biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the UK and in the tropics; the structure and dynamics of insect food webs and their responses to perturbations; the role of plant pathogens and insect herbivores in structuring and maintaining the high diversity of rainforest plants; and the impact of climate change on interspecific interactions and associated ecosystem functions and services.

I am also part of the leadership team for the Darwin Tree of Life programme, an ambitious initiatiative to sequence the complete genomes of tens of thousands of species of eukaryotic organisms in Britain and Ireland.

https://communityecology.zoo.ox.ac.uk/https://www.darwintreeoflife.org/