I am a PhD student in the department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Karl Cottenie (University of Guelph) and Chris Buddle (McGill University). My main research interests are Arctic and community ecology. My PhD research is focused on Arctic flies (Diptera) and the importance of considering scale and different biodiversity measures in community assembly. I am working on a fly dataset at the continental scale (across 12 Canadian northern sites) and at local-scale in Churchill, MB, to examine the large-scale and small-scale drivers of fly community assembly. I first became interested in Arctic ecology after finishing my undergraduate in Applied Zoology at McGill University. I was hired as a field assistant for the Northern Biodiversity Program, which documents changes in Canada's northern arthropod fauna. I had the opportunity that summer to travel to northern sites to collect insects. Being part of this project motivated me to pursue a M.Sc. in Arctic ecology. My M.Sc. thesis was a molecular and ecological study of flies (Diptera) which assessed differences in diversity between glacial and postglacial grasslands in the southern Yukon.