Her research focuses on biodiversity, invasion ecology, plant-soil interactions, environmental change, and threshold dynamics. She has been involved with wide-ranging ecological research, with a particular emphasis on experimental manipulations and quantitative data analysis, since receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999. She came to UC Berkeley from UC Irvine in 2009, where she was in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. At Berkeley, she teaches classes in restoration ecology and is a professor of restoration ecology in the UC Agricultural Experimental Station.