Jennifer C McElwain received her B.A. in Botany from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland in 1993 and her PhD in Paleobotany in 1997 from Royal Holloway College , University of London . She was a Natural Environment Research Council Post Doctoral research associate between 1997 and 1998 and a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow between 1998 and 2000, at the University of Sheffield . McElwain held the position of Assistant Curator of Paleobotany at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago between 2000 and 2003 and then became Associate Curator of Paleobotany from 2003 until 2006, when she took up her current position as Lecturer in Plant Palaeoecology and Palaeobiology in UCD’s School of Biology and Environmental Science. She is a Research Associate of the Field Museum and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Northwestern University , USA . She is currently the director of UCD’s Plant Palaeoecology and Palaeobiology research group and team leader of a 1.75 million euro EU Marie Curie Excellence Grant, which seeks to investigate the causes and consequences of the fourth greatest extinction event in Earth history at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, 200 million years ago. Her research interests include plant macroecology and macroevolution, mass extinction and the use of fossil plants as proxies for reconstructing paleoamospheric composition (CO2, O2 and SO2), paleoelevation and paleoclimate.