Profile

Hello I’m Alex! I am 28 and I live in Bangor (Wales) with my wife and 4 cats (Yuki, Boo, Moogle and Ziggy shown in the pictures below). I am a PhD student at Bangor University’s School of Education and I work very closely within the Psychology department so I get to meet lots of people who work on different stuff! After a day of work I like to unwind by playing video games, watching movies and anime, and eating junk food (probably pizza!).

My main goal in science is to help people to get through their lives a little easier. At the moment I am looking into how our brains process math and numbers, and how we can get really emotional and stressed when we do math, and what that means for how we can organize our thoughts and figure out answers. I’m also looking at ways we can trick the brain to do math better when we’re stressed about it.

I do a lot of teaching on the side of my research, I teach an introduction to Psychology module, as well as a Biological Psychology module where we get to look at all the bits of the brain. I also help teach research skills and statistics in the hope that the next generation of scientists are even smarter!

My PhD started out as replicating a previous experiment from our lab where people who were high in anxiety performed better in tasks that use a lot of mental resources when they listen to instructions or read them out loud to themselves, compared to reading them silently in their heads. We made our task more complicated to figure out if there was any overlap (is there any effect whilst reading and ignoring sounds, or listening and ignoring writing), where we found that people who are highly anxious get distracted by sounds when reading, and do better in tasks when they just listening to instructions.

Following this I worked on a paper where I had to read and combine 86 published scientific experiments and then write about what all of these papers had to say when combined. The more that say the same thing, the better we can trust their message! This paper is currently under review for publication!

Next I ran an experiment where people perform math equations whilst reading everything out loud to themselves, or are working in silence, to see if they perform better when listening to themselves read instructions. Surprisingly we found that reading out loud did not really help!

I am currently following this experiment up with another one where people have to listen to a reading of Alice in Wonderland. Listening to the reading makes it really hard to focus on the math, so you are unable to use the voice in your head to figure out what the equations are. We want to see if there is a difference between doing this, or reading math out loud to yourself.

My work involves discussing specific functions within the front of the brain, and areas that process negative emotions whilst trying to use this knowledge to help people in school or out of it.

My usual day consists of teaching an early morning 9am class, I normally run 3 classes a week, and the content of the class changes depending on when in the year it is. My classes are normally all online because the students come from all over the world, as I teach international students. Because things are calming down with Covid my teaching is slowly moving back to teaching in person which is nice!

After that I check my emails in case I have any emails for important updates (applications to various things – like I’m A Scientist!, or updates on participants for my experiments). I also lead a research project so I need to make sure I constantly check my email for updates, and make sure my student researchers know what they are doing, when they should be testing participants and making sure everyone is happy with what is going on.

Sometimes I have video call meetings with my supervisor who is like my teacher, to make sure we both know what we are doing this week. We normally do these whenever we have time, but at the moment we teach together on Fridays so we go for lunch and have a chat!

Running experiments can be quite fun. I’m still doing online only experiments as it is easier to do without having to worry about rules. When I have a participant booked in I’ll give them a call online where I give them the program to run which contains all of the things in my experiment. I put myself on mute so I don’t distract them, and just sit in silence listening to them to make sure they’re doing what they are supposed to! Because my experiments rely on people reading things out loud I need to make sure they do it, usually they don’t unless I remind them!

I have to keep preparing for any classes that I have, so I am always reading new science articles and information so I can keep myself and my students up to date on the current findings. A lot can go on if you’re not keeping an eye on Google, so I make sure to check up pretty regularly. Whilst listening to participants do my experiments I have some time to read a few bits which is handy!