I am a first year graduate student in the Plant Biology Department, and I am broadly interested in the effects of climate change on ecosystem function.  I have studied the effects of elevated carbon dioxide concentrations, elevated temperature and drought on soil microbial communities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory as part of DOE’s Global Change Education Program.  My research in Dr. Leakey’s laboratory focuses on plant physiological responses to drought, how these responses are affected by elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and how these physiological responses scale up to alter ecosystem function.  I am conducting this study at the soyFACE facility here at UIUC (http://soyface.uiuc.edu).