Do you think this award will change your career?

Yes, I expect it will have an impact on my career. Awards such as this can be used as a springboard for applications for funding, promotions or new job opportunities. In particular, the ProSPER.NET-Scopus award is for scientists younger than 40, which is extremely important given that science is such a difficult game in which to get permanent positions.

What is the biggest challenge for today's young scientists?

It is simply getting out of the postdoc cycle and into a permanent faculty or full-time position. There's not an excess of funding in any country, so it is very competitive to get funding and there are limited opportunities for permanent employment.

Do you have a research strategy to further your career?

My tactic up to this point has been to balance some risky, technically challenging experiments that push the boundaries with more straightforward research. I consider the development of molecular-biology techniques, such as DNA fingerprinting of soil microbes, to be my greatest scientific achievement. It has opened up new avenues of research, helping to construct a picture of species distributions underground. But I balance that work with other experiments in which I have a more direct idea of where they will lead so that I can make the currency — publications and grant income — necessary for a young scientist to get the elusive faculty position.

Has 'sustainability' driven your research career?

In the early days of my career, I was purely interested in the ecology of a system or organism. Having studied these natural forest ecosystems for the past few years, I began to see the broader context of how organisms fit into ecosystems and into the planet in general. So, although I may not have realized it straight away, my work on soil fungal functions in nutrient and carbon cycling has sharpened my focus on sustainability of ecosystems from a biodiversity and conservation point of view.

Is there a single question that could sustain your research career for years?

For the next 10 years, the big challenge for me will be turning my research focus to climate change. I want to understand how these soil microorganisms are going to respond to climate change and what their role is in adaptation to and potential mitigation of climate change. We are really just starting to understand how soil fungi work, so there is a huge amount of fundamental ecology to do on the organisms themselves. At the broadest level, we need to understand the basic biology of organisms in order to address bigger issues such as climate change.