 My research looks at the interface between biological and non-biological processes of soil formation and weathering, which might not sound very exciting but crucial to supporting life on earth. We're eroding our soils around 100 to 1,000 times faster than they're forming. My research looks at ways to minimise that and improve the quality of the soils that we have left as well as making new soils. I was very surprised when I found out that I'd run last year. It was a very competitive field so yeah I was absolutely honoured. Very grateful to all the donors who support this event. Very grateful to be nominated to enter as well. Yeah just really surprised. The prize money from last year I've used to support investigation of how microbes hitch rides around our environment. There's a bit of a problem that I'd noticed in some of the systems that I look at where they'd been degraded to the point that they didn't have much biological activity at all. Some of these recovered faster than the others. One of my questions was well where are these new microbes coming from? What we've done is identify some of those sources and that will help us to understand how best to repair these degraded soils. These types of events are really important for early career researches because they give them an opportunity to communicate their science to the local community, network with their peers and also practice their outreach skills. This year we've added in a small training course to better prepare candidates for the event and hopefully they'll have such a good time here that they'll want to do further outreach again in the future. I'd like to say a huge thank you to all the donors who support this event. Your support encourages early career researchers who for many this might be the first time that they've done outreach and it's great to see the diversity of research and researchers at UWA supported.