Academic and Professional Background

• Personal Resume:

  Kirsty graduated in 2006 with a BSc (Hons) in Marine Biology and Coastal Ecology from the University of Plymouth, UK. She then went on to study at Imperial College London, gaining an MSc in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation in 2007. Her masters thesis was titled "Modelling spillover from marine reserves: Gladden Spit, Belize".

  In 2008 Kirsty worked as a Graduate Ecologist in the UK, and later as a volunteer field ecologist in St. Lucia, West Indies, for Durrel Wildlife Conservation Trust.

  Kirsty is currently based in the Plant Ecology lab at the Bio-protection research centre. Her PhD, "Quantifying invasion risk: commercial trees as a model system",  is supervised by Prof. Richard Duncan, Prof. Phil Hulme, and Dr. Michael Watt (SCION).

  Kirsty's research seeks to understand why some species and not others become invasive. Kirsty uses the weath of information availble on the introduction and naturalisation histories of commercial trees to investigate the effects of life-history traits, propagule pressure, climate match, and a range of human use traits on invasion success, within a  stage-based framework of the invasion process (introduction, naturalisation and invasion). Kirsty's work takes large datasets and applies diverse statistical and modelling techniques.