I am only successful if you see how far I've come - and very few people can see the start I had in life...so the key, from my point of view, is to expand your knowledge of the world beyond yourself and your situation - keep doing that every day and eventually, you'll look back with pride.

Being a part of the Antarctic science community for the last decade has been an incredible experience - Antarctica has become an integral part of my identity, and I am proud to be here. I am one of only a few scientists worldwide who have the taxonomic knowledge to identify stylasterid corals, and I have discovered new species from East Antarctica and the Scotia Arc. My PhD developed tools to assess coral phylogenetics and evolutionary connectivity. In particular, I developed a case study linking evolutionary mechanisms and ocean chemistry, today and in the past to look at long term controls on coral distributions. This work has important implications for present day changes in ocean chemistry (ocean acidification).

My work extended, post-PhD to collaborate with the Antarctic Seabed Carbon Capture Change, which formed during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition. Our research has important implications for climate change mitigation, with a focus on blue carbon (biological storage of carbon on the Antarctic seafloor). In order to move our research from the exploration stage towards conservation policy, I recently led a science/policy collaboration to protect Antarctic blue carbon within the Antarctic Treaty System and the United Nations Climate Change regime. These collaborations have brought me to the point professionally, where I have a voice on issues of biodiversity conservation and climate change in Antarctica.

Looking forward, I am one of the many researchers who worked on the biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean following the Census of Antarctic Marine Life project which ended in 2010. As a research community we are building on this body of work over the next decade through initiatives including, the Marine Ecosystem Assessment of the Southern Ocean, and the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census Atlas project, and the ‘Future Seas’ initiative, hosted by the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania. This initiative delivers a series of journal articles addressing key challenges for the UN International Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030.

This level of cross-disciplinary research needs financial support, and relies upon expensive ship-based technology and field-work, and post-field expensive genetic techniques and international travel in order to effectively collaborate. I hope that my proudest professional achievement is yet to come, and that it will relate to the conservation of Antarctic biodiversity and climate change mitigation efforts.