Jess is doing her M.Sc. in the Department of Biological Sciences, where she is jointly supervised by Heather Proctor and Lisa Lumley (Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute). Jess completed a diploma in Environmental Technology at Canadore College in North Bay, Ontario, and then went on to get her B.Sc.in Environmental Biology at Nipissing University. In the summer she would collect benthic macroinvertebrate samples across Muskoka, Ontario, and discovered how much she loved working with arthropods. This led to an opportunity to work on a collaborative research project in the Proctor and Lumley labs, assessing the diversity, distribution, and dispersal patterns of oribatid mites within the North Saskatchewan River watershed.