Dr. Susannah French, PhD, is a professor of biology and the associate dean of research and faculty in the college of science at Utah State University. Dr. French received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in 2002 and a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2006. She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University before she joined the Biology faculty at Utah State University in 2009. Her research group currently includes 4 Ph.D., 1 Masters, and an army of undergraduate students, who are invaluable to her work. Dr. French has received funding from the National Science Foundation, USGS, USFW, and National Geographic, including the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Dr. French conducts studies of vertebrates in the US, as well as The Bahamas, Galapagos Islands, Honduras, and the arctic, to better understand how animals interact with their environments. Disturbances in the environment, including human-induced perturbations, affect how animals allocate energy resources to respond to stress, reproduce, and fight disease. In the case of the reptiles studied by Dr. French, those effects are not well understood. She is using a variety of methods to track, monitor and experiment with these animals across their lifespans, to answer these questions, which will help paint a broader picture of how species respond to environmental change.