Dr Barbara Drigo conducted her doctoral studies at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and was awarded her PhD in 2009. Her PhD project involved a number of interrelated methods in molecular microbial ecology to study effects of climatic conditions on plant-soil-microbial interactions. She then became research fellow at Wageningen University, where she studied the correlation between disease suppressiveness and bio-control agents. Shortly after she moved to the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, where she development novel experimental systems to test microbial dynamics and functioning in response to environmental change. In August 2016 she became lecturer at University of South Australia.