Profile

I’m a researcher in developmental psychology and also a lecturer at the university. I’m specifically interested in young children’s creativity, their language abilities, and their social skills. I recently started reading and researching about how children understand humour, and I think it’s fascinating!

I enjoy discovering new places (although I get lost quite easily, so every journey is an adventure!), camping when the weather is nice, and walking near a river or in the woods. I sometimes go for a run too, but if I’m completely honest, I don’t really enjoy it. I only do it because it’s healthy 🙂

I love teaching at the university, especially when I can see that students are interested in a topic and they ask questions. It feels like I am making a change in others’ lives, or at least make them curious about a psychology topic which is quite exciting. I also enjoy doing research because it allows me to find some answers (or find even more questions) about some questions that I am curious about. Staying curious is what motivates me as a researcher, and I want my students to experience that too 🙂

My research focuses on young children’s abilities. During my career, I focused on many different areas. I am very interested in children’s creative skills (for example when they make up a story), their social skills (for example, how they understand that other people might think or feel differently from themselves), their language skills (for example how children who use different languages might have similar or different skills) among others. Before I became a lecturer at the university, I was a full-time researcher and my role involved doing fun experiments with children in the lab or at their schools. When working with children, it is quite important to keep the experiments interesting, fun, and game-like, because otherwise children might get bored or tired. It means that, by making the experiments fun for them, I end up having lots of fun with them too!

One of the interesting things about being a lecturer is that your days can be quite different from one another. Some days I have three lectures back to back, which can be quite tiring, but some days I don’t have any, and I have lots of other things to do. Some of the things I do include reading and marking student essays, creating research projects for them, researching and preparing my lectures (I try to make them fun too by adding fun photos, videos, or short quizzes), checking if my students are attending their lectures and are happy with their course, and having meetings with them about academic or personal topics.