I am a scuba diver and coral enthusiast from Albania, with a Bachelor of Advanced Science in Marine Biology from James Cook University, Australia. With the Great Barrier Reef on my doorstep, I took up every opportunity to be amongst it. I ran courses and organised diving day trips for the uni dive club; volunteered as diver for a reef monitoring expedition; collected samples underwater with Dr. Katharina Fabricius and her lab members studying acidification impacts on inshore reefs. On land I enjoyed coding in R, tutoring part time an introductory modelling subject at my university. Under Dr. Scott Heron I modelled frequency of extreme low tides in Guam to predict reef vulnerability to subaerial exposure. For Dr. Line Bay’s lab at the Australian Institute of Marine Science I monitored and analysed growth of Acropora loripes fragments subjected to different temperature treatments. I am fascinated by corals, and keen to keep studying them in the del Campo lab. For my M.Sc thesis I’m looking into the eukaryotic and bacterial communities within the Leptogorgia sarmentosa holobiont using metabarcoding and transcriptomics.