About

My relationship with fungi began not in a laboratory but on a November morning in the Yorkshire countryside, when I was twelve years old and found a cluster of Flammulina velutipes — velvet shanks — growing from the base of a fallen elm. I didn't know what they were. I photographed them, drew them in a notebook, and spent three days identifying them through a second-hand field guide.

That notebook is still on my desk.

What struck me then, and still drives everything I do now, is the paradox at the heart of mycology: fungi are simultaneously the most important and the most overlooked kingdom on Earth. They feed nine-tenths of terrestrial plant life through mycorrhizal networks. They decompose the carbon that would otherwise choke the planet. They communicate through chemistry in ways we are only beginning to decode. And yet they remain almost entirely invisible to the public, studied by a small community, and absent from most conservation conversations.

I came to Leeds to study microbiology, but I stayed for the mycology. My BSc dissertation gave me the methodological toolkit — molecular ecology, soil science, statistical modelling. My PhD at Reading gave me the question that genuinely keeps me up at night: what do we lose, ecologically, when we lose fungal diversity?