My interest in bat ecology started when I was very young, and two-year-old me had no concrete reason why bats were the coolest animal out there, they just were. As I grew older, my interest in bats diminished with the growing pressure of school and the thought of getting a good job. During my undergraduate years, I worked on a variety of different research topics including water quality, bacteriophage genomics, and soil microbiomes. While I enjoyed these projects and the research process, I felt myself drifting back to the organism that first drew me into conservation biology, bats. So, for my master’s I sought out a lab that focused on bat research, and I landed at Texas Christian University where I led a project looking at how the income of neighborhoods affected insect and bat diversity and activity across Fort Worth, TX. This project is what piqued my interest in how sociology and ecology can be integrated to better understand the human dimensions in bat ecology. Currently, I am a PhD student in Dr. Kingston’s Bat Conservation Ecology lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I plan to explore social-ecological networks of bats and local residents here in Champaign Urbana!