Some people come to science through textbooks. I came through the field — through tick drags across wildlife corridors, through hours at a sequencing machine, through the slow, satisfying work of making sense of what lives inside the animals we share this planet with.

I’m a molecular biologist and biological sciences researcher with an MSc focused on tick-borne parasite detection at the wildlife-domestic animal interface. My day job involves next-generation sequencing, phylogenetic analysis, and the kind of painstaking laboratory work that rarely makes the news — but frequently makes for extraordinary reading when the right author gets hold of it.