Profile

I am someone who has moved around quite a lot.  In the UK I have lived in Burton-on-Trent, Manchester, London and now Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I have also lived in a place called Wollongong in Australia, it is near Sydney and very beautiful. I have been in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for just over 12 months.

I enjoy my work and know I need to keep a work-life balance. Outside of work, I enjoy walking and exploring new places, both cities and the countryside. I read a lot of fiction books to relax although I enjoy a good scare so do sometimes read unusual and spooky tales. I love trying out new cooking recipes and feeding my friends! Jelly is a new furry cat friend who moved in with me this year. She makes sure I wake up before my alarm in the morning and tells me long stories when she comes home from an adventure.

I am a psychologist who works at Northumbria University. I teach undergraduate students studying psychology. I also supervise and help guide students to investigate different research topics when they are undergraduate, Masters and PhD students. I enjoy helping young people develop their own interests and become who they want to be in their future. I believe education allows people to have options and choices for their future, to decide who they want to be, where they want to be, and what they want to do with their lives.

My research is about helping to understand why some people seem vulnerable to developing mental health disorders. In my research I sometimes ask people to do surveys, sometimes I get people to do tasks, which are like computer games, while other times I am interested in how people experience their every day life. I am interested in how people see themselves and the world around them. This can include their style of thinking. Mental health disorders can change the way people see themselves and how they live their lives. Therefore, in the future, I would like us to be able to teach people ways of living and thinking which protect and support their mental well being.

All my days are very different. Most days I will see students to talk about their research or study. Students come with their own ideas and I help them shape these ideas into a study which can answer the questions they have.

Some days I will teach either online or in a classroom. We have been teaching online since the COVID19 pandemic, this has meant learning different ways of doing things. Like how to run online quizzes and polls while in classes so students can check how they are doing as we go along. In classrooms, I like to make the students do some thinking themselves! This means I come up with activities so students can use the information they have learned to address problems and questions themselves. This can help to build their confidence.

I spend some time writing research ideas and developing new studies. There are always more questions than answers in understanding mental health disorders. There is a lot we still don’t know about the mind, the brain and the body and how these effect one another. So I need to understand what other people have found in their research so I can add another little piece to the puzzle in the next study I run. Not all studies work out the way I hope! But sometimes this can me more than when they do! I learn from each study what to do differently next time and how I can do things better.

At lunch I will take a walk. Although I have been at Northumbria over 12 months, I have not been on the campus often. So I am still learning my way around. The most silly thing I have done so far is get myself lot in a stairway! I worked my way out eventually! The Northumbria city campus has good coffee and lunch places nearby, I am still finding out which one is the best.

In the afternoons I will look at research results and write these into papers for publication. We write up our research into papers so that we can share our findings with other people, this means others can learn from our successes and mistakes. Much like your school work is reviewed and marked, our papers are assessed and reviewed by multiple people. We get back a lot of feedback… sometimes it is positive… other times it is critical and negative. This means we are learning all the time different opinions and different approaches to research. While the critical comments can be hard to understand, often they are very useful. Getting published takes a lot of work and persistence.

Throughout the day I will talk to my friends so that we can work out better ways of doing things or understanding our work. We all do different teaching and research which means  we have different knowledge. This is great because it means we all look at the world differently and understand psychology from a different perspective. There are a lot of different areas to psychology and it is not possible to be an expert in all of them. Therefore it is important to have friends who are willing to share their knowledge so we learn from one another.