I am an applied health services researcher based at the Community and Primary Care Research Group.  I work in the broad area of proactive, person-centred care for people living with dementia and other serious illnesses. My work aims to improve quality of life and care experiences through better communication and planning across the life course, particularly in contexts of uncertainty such as dementia.

I am experienced in a range of methods, gained from working in different research areas.  These include linguistic analysis (speech, language and communication in schizophrenia), functional magnetic resonance imagine (neural correlates of bilingualism; impact of cognitive decline in neural function), realist evaluation (post-diagnostic dementia support) and realist economic evaluation (family-focused support for children in high deprivation areas). Currently, I hold an NIHR Dementia Capacity Building Fellowship, which has supported my transition to becoming an applied health services researcher.  My current work and interests include: (1) advance care planning and reducing unplanned or high-level care (e.g. hospitalisations) especially for conditions like dementia where trajectory is uncertain and made more complex by the presence of other long-term conditions; (2) person-centred palliative care across the life course, with a focus communication in serious illness;  (3) how to deliver the best possible care and support in resource-limited settings; and (4) developing and enhancing ways of including people from under-served communities (e.g. people with dementia, those who lack cognitive capacity) in all aspects of the research process.

From 2019 to 2024, I was Programme Lead for the NIHR-funded Dementia PersonAlised Care Team (D-PACT) project, which developed and evaluated a primary care-based model of dementia support.

Member, NIHR Academy Member Voices Group (July 2024 to present)

Lay member, HRA Cornwall & Plymouth Research Ethics Committee (Jan 2020 to Nov 2025)

2021 cohort, Foundation Future Leaders Programme (Foundation for Science and Technology)

• Waine, H. Functional grammatical development in children with Developmental Language Disorder
• Lim Li Koon, Reading processes in biscriptal children in Singapore
• Masnidah Masnawi, Imageability and verb-noun naming in Aphasia: Can the effect of grammatical class be reduced to differences in imageability?
• Philina Ng, Fusiform gyrus: Investigation of visual word recognition in the bilingual brain
• Seng Su Lin, Bilingual language control and switching

I am a founding member of RIPELS (Researchers in Palliative and End of Life Support) at Plymouth.

Previous universities worked at

• Plymouth Marjon University (Jan 2016 - May 2019)
• National University of Singapore (May 2002 - Dec 2015)
• Universiti Sains Malaysia (July 1999 - Apr 2002)

Previous roles

• Associate Dean for Research (Plymouth Marjon University)
• Head of Department (English & Language Sciences, Plymouth Marjon Unversity)
• Chair of University Research Ethics (Plymouth Marjon University)
• Graduate Chair (Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singaopre)
• Chair of Department Research Ethics (Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore)