Orly is a Senior Lecturer in Ecology and NERC Independent Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She received her PhD in 2013 from the University of Bristol on the conservation genetics of bats. Her research sits at the interface between ecology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology and biogeography. Her group (Global Change Genetics: http://globalchangegenetics.org) works on the ecological and evolutionary responses of biodiversity to global environmental changes in desert, tropical and temperate ecosystems. They integrate genomic tools with ecological research and spatial modelling to understand how environmental heterogeneity affects geographic distribution, genetic composition, adaptive capacity and ecological interactions.