Associate Professor of Psychology

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Teaching) 

Member of the Vitae Mental Health and Wellbeing Working Group

I enjoy teaching in:

• Clinical and applied psychology, including mental health and wellbeing, formulation, and intervention
• History and philosophy of psychology
• Critical and transpersonal psychology, particularly in relation to clinical psychology

Research interests:
My main research area is student mental health. Following my PhD, I developed an award-winning intervention for postgraduate research student wellbeing. More recently, I have led and been part of several projects seeking to better understand, and reduce, student loneliness. I am also interested in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Higher Education, particularly regarding how women's health issues (including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause) are acknowledged and accommodated in HE policy and practice. I like to take a systems-focused approach to the topics of wellbeing and inclusion in HE, for example, by investigating how institutional structures, culture, and policies affect lived experience. I have an emerging interest in HE staff wellbeing and how student and staff wellbeing interact. 

I have broader interests in the areas of clinical, critical, and transpersonal psychology. My PhD research explored the conceptual and theoretical understanding of social anxiety with regards to its overlap with paranoia. I am also interested in the role of negative, intrusive mental imagery in mental health and its potential as a target for intervention, as well as critical and transpersonal psychologies and their overlap with clinical psychology.

I like to take a mixed-methods approach to research, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyse data. Methods I use include interviews, surveys, and experiments.

Grants awarded:

Office for Students / Research England CATALYST funding: £139,000 - March 2018. Peer Support for Postgraduate Research Student Wellbeing.

UKRI / SMaRteN Student Mental Health Research Network: £10,000 - May 2020. Social Connectedness and Wellbeing in Students. 

PIHR Arts & Health Collaboration fund: £2,000 - November 2021. Public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.