Rebecca Hewitt recently finished her PhD with Drs. Terry Chapin and Teresa Hollingsworth at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her dissertation investigated whether plant-fungal interactions after wildfire influenced seedling establishment at and beyond current treeline. She explored the effects of post-fire mycorrhizal community structure on the physiological performance of treeline seedlings and collaborated with the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning to investigate the landscape implications of her plot-level studies by implementing a mycorrhizal-submodel in simulations of tree migration using the fire-vegetation-climate model ALFRESCO. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Mack Lab at Northern Arizona University she will investigate the belowground plant traits and plant-fungal interactions that confer access to nitrogen released from thawed permafrost.