I’m a doctoral candidate in the University of Auckland’s Joint Graduate School in Plant and Food Science, based at Plant & Food Research.

I’m passionate about understanding how plant pathogens emerge, evolve, and cause disease. In particular, I’m interested in understanding how plant pathogens co-evolve with their hosts, both in the field and in experimental settings.

My PhD research focuses on using the kiwifruit pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae to understand how plant pathogens evolve during incursions. I’m examining effector requirements, redundancies, and repertoire refinement across different kiwifruit hosts, using complementary approaches of orchard-based genome biosurveillance and effector knockout strain competition!

I’m also a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Auckland, where I teach practical laboratories on plant pathology and statistical coding. In my free time, I dabble in macrophotography - you can see some of my recent pictures in my gallery!