Profile

I am 26 and  live in Manchester, but I’m preparing to move to York for my job there.

I play video games when I get the chance and have just become the Pokemon Champion with my Eevee who’s called Buttercup!

I like to go for walks when I get the chance and there are some pretty views like this:

I’m genderfluid which means sometimes I’m a girl, sometimes I’m a boy, but a lot of the time I’m somewhere in between. Because of this my pronouns vary but they/them is usually OK.

My work looks at the way technology affects memory- to make it better or worse. Technology considers everything from the computer you’re using now to ‘Augmented Reality Glasses’ which can make you see things on top of the real world.

One of my favourite studies I did was looking at using Virtual Reality (VR, when you put on a headset to see a completely different world) to improve memory of places. I got to spend hours playing in VR (for science!), but sometimes I lost track of where I was in the real world and hit the walls.

Because technology considers so many things I’ve had to narrow it down a bit for my PhD. I look at technology most people have- computers and phones.

But memory is also big! It can include memories of your 5th birthday party, to memories you might not realise you have, like how to write. So to narrow it down I’m surrently looking at how well people can remember words and how many of the words they can recognise.

Next, I will try and do what we call ‘applied’ research where I ask people to watch loads of telly and ask them what they remember of the show.

What I love about my work is every day is different. Sometimes I’m running experiments and am moving around getting my equipment ready, and other days I do a lot of writing to share what my I found with everyone else.

Most days I get into the office and check my emails to find out about exciting things coming up! Then I go and see Freddy the coffee machine to get some energy for the day!

In my work, I have to make my tools so I spend time coding and making websites for people to use to take part in my experiments. This means when I do research I come up with a question, work out how to measure the ‘dependent variable’ (which for me is memories), write code to save the information, then work out what the information means.

This takes a long time so sometimes I don’t get an answer to my question for nearly a year!

As a cyber psychologist, I mainly work at my desk and try and get cool gadgets to play with. One of my favourites is the eye tracker that we use to see where people are looking at a screen.  We got a cool video of where I looked as I watched a video of a bunny! One of my ‘jobs’ is to help others in the office test things because one of my special skills is breaking technology.

This is an example of a memory test I made that runs on a website. The file ‘stimuli.py’ on the right saves all the data for me and gets the right webpage when people click ‘next’. The ‘.thtml’ files on the right are what people see on each page.

Then in the browser window you can see what that code turns into when the people visit the website.