My broad career path was settled when I was just a toddler…  While other children played cops and robbers, I upended rocks, adamant that I would become an entomologist and not a policeman.  But my world was upended in my second year of university when the inspiring UCT botanists (Jeremy Midgley, William Bond and Peter Linder) hijacked my mind with the wonders of plants.  Their brand of hypothesis-driven field science excited me and profoundly influenced how I teach and conduct research.  They taught me to be critical, creative and questioning, and demonstrated how science can be a source of mental and physical adventure. My first love is the field, observing organisms in their natural environments, inventing hypotheses and testing them by means of experiments. I am driven by the desire to understand why organisms look the way they do, and how they are adapted to their biotic and abiotic environments. Studying pollination biology, herbivory and seed dispersal, I get to delve into the interactions between plants, insects and other animals, daily exploring a world even more intricate and complex than the one imagined by my three-year-old self.