I am a PhD student at the University of York, supervised by Dr David Dickinson. My research focus is the Kinetic Ballooning Mode (KBM), an electromagnetic plasma instability driven by a pressure gradient. This is of particular relevance in the pedestal region of highly confined plasmas (in which steep pressure gradients exist), where it may be performance-limiting. I am currently studying KBM phenomenology via local gyrokinetic simulations and comparison to simple models; having done this, I will then consider the effect of 3D magnetic configurations on the instability. This may help us understand the effect of Resonant Magnetic Perturbations (used to mitigate more destructive instabilities) in tokamaks, or electromagnetic turbulence in the next generation of stellarator plasmas.