I was born in the Netherlands and raised in Colombia, Nicaragua and Spain. In 2004 I obtained a BSc degree in Biology from the Free University of Amsterdam. My undergraduate thesis was on Arctic systems ecology, and I conducted three months of fieldwork in Svalbard for my research.

In 2005 I moved to Oxford to pursue an MSc in Integrative Bioscience. I did two research projects during this degree, both at WildCRU. My first project was on the effects of different ways of farming on rare butterflies that breed in hedges, the second was on lion diet in Zimbabwe (PLOS One 8(2)pp.1-10). I completed my MSc in 2006 and after a few months away from Oxford, returned to pursue an MRes.
My MRes was on reproductive physiology of Ethiopian wolves and included three field seasons in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains to study both male (Gen Comp Endocrinol 197(1)pp.30-37) and female wolves (Phys & Behav 122 pp39-45). After completing my MRes I worked at WildCRU briefly on a WSPA funded study on the wildlife trade (Bioscience 63(12) pp.928-938).

In 2011 I started working as a research assistant/PhD student at the University of Salford. My main focus was on parasites in the genus Echinococcus, which are zoonotic and cause echinococcosis in humans. Domestic dogs are an important final host of Echinococcus parasites, and my work included studying canine echinococcosis in Kyrgyzstan (Parasitol 140, pp. 1674-1684) and China (Acta Trop, in press). I also managed to be involved in several other projects during this time in collaboration with people at WildCRU, including on helminths of Ethiopian wolves (J Helminth, in press) and the moral basis of conservation (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, in press). I completed my PhD in February 2015 and will be starting a Postdoc at the University of Michigan in March 2015, working on behavioural physiology of red squirrels in Yukon.