This year brings massive professional and personal changes for me as I am on maternity leave (big news #1) until January 2020 when I will start a new position of Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke (big news #2) in Quebec, which also means that we are moving from Calgary to Sherbrooke with a newborn baby girl this spring.

Although I am navigating the joys and challenges of being a new mom, I still have many projects that I want to see through this year. I plan to attend the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution (CSEE) annual meeting in Fredericton in August, during which Dr. Carly Ziter (new prof. @ Concordia in Montreal) and I are organizing a symposium on “Integrating urban ecology across scales and trophic levels”. I am also hoping that I can complete some of the ongoing manuscripts from my postdoctoral fellowship and other collaborations.

More recently, Dr. Briana Whitaker (postdoc at @ NCSU) and I have had the pleasure of collaborating on a perspective article in the Journal of American Botany: “Decrypting the phyllosphere microbiota: progress and challenges”. Hope you enjoy the read!