Iris holds a doctoral degree in Education for Sustainability. She has undertaken projects in capacity building, training and skills development for sustainability in a number of countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2008, she was awarded the Voiceless Factory Farming Grant to study the attitudes toward factory farming in Australia. This gave her the opportunity to include animal issues more explicitly into her research and it marks her entry into animal studies. She is now specifically interested in extending the sustainability discourse to include all animals, and to explore the usefulness of applying sustainability language for human-animal relationships. She is fortunate enough to be able to realise this as part of a doctoral research project specifically looking at human-horse relationships in horseracing. This project is based at the University of Sydney.