text: Carly Joanne Stevens has been awarded B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. In 2004 her PhD was awarded by the Open University for her work on the effects of nitrogen on grassland ecology supervised by Nancy Dise, David Gowing and Owen Mountford. It was carried out in collaboration with the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks Wood.  Prior to her appointment at University of Lancaster, Stevens was a research fellow at the Open University.