 I'm from Perth, Western Australia and I've lived in Western Australia all my life apart from brief excursions overseas. I've got quite a long study history at DWA. First of all, I did a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology. Then after a brief stint in the workforce, I then went back and did a PhD with the Psychology Department at DWA and doing computational neuroscience. Then I went back and worked for quite some years in Information Technology as a computer programmer, but I never really liked office jobs and I never really intended to make a career out of an office career and I always had an interest in the natural world and so I had an intention to change my career at some point and I wanted to change it into the area of the natural world and as it turned out, I made that career change a few years ago and got another degree, a Bachelor of Science in Botany and now I'm doing this PhD. My research area, broadly speaking, is plant nutrient acquisition and specifically nutrient acquisition in plant communities, natural plant communities on what are relatively impoverished soils as opposed to the soils that you get in the Northern Hemisphere here in Southwest WA and also in Brazil. There are some very nutrient impoverished soils and the plant communities have special adaptations to those conditions. I chose UWA initially because I lived here and subsequently after I made my career change, well after I decided to make my career change into Botany, UWA was the only university in Western Australia that offered that course so that made the choice rather easy for me. UWA has top facilities, world-class facilities, on the campus has a hole. The school that I'm in has very good facilities in general but if the school doesn't have the facilities that you want, you can always go and use other schools' equipment or other facilities such as my crossword equipment at the CMCA that I use. So it's all there. After I finish this PhD I really have two main avenues that I can go down. One is an academic route which would start with a postdoc. The other is working with a government or private agency as a specialist botanical or ecological consultant of some sort. Which avenue I decided to take really depends on the roles that are available. I think at the moment the postdoc route would be the most likely option. Ultimately I would like to work in an industry in an area which is revolved around plant science. My dream job would be working in the area of plant science but looking at the whole spectrum rather than just focusing on one small element I'd like to do for example a lot of field work, some laboratory work, some experimental work. Combine the whole lot into a theoretical framework and so to get my hands into various sort of pots.