Profile

I haven’t always been a fan of working out. I think doing netball, rounders, football, ballet, tap and cross country running as a child put me off exercise for a while and I turned my attention to music instead. I have played the flute since I was a child and whilst at University I was in a rock band with my brother and friends, that’s how I met my husband in fact – how rock & roll! But, in the last few years I have really started to enjoy getting out and exercising more. It’s great for my physical and mental health, and for socialising. I love trying all sorts of classes including zumba, step and tone, metafit, boxercise and piloxing but my favourite has to be clubbercise – exercising in the dark with glow sticks! It doesn’t feel like exercise at all, it’s so much fun. When I want to do something a little less intense I enjoy a walk and catch up with friends. I’m really lucky to live just 10 minutes from the sea and right by the North Yorkshire Moors too, so I have so many gorgeous coastal 🏖 and hill 🏞 walks on my doorstep despite being only 25minutes drive from work in Middlesbrough. Getting out in the hills is definitely my happy place.

Most of the time, when I am not at work, I am spending time with my little boy and husband. We have a campervan 🚐 and love getting away for adventures in it.

My job is really interesting because it involves lots of different tasks. Some of the time I am teaching our students at the University. I usually teach on modules about critical thinking, research methods and cognitive psychology.

When I am not teaching or preparing teaching materials I will often be working on my research. My main research interest is face recognition. The research we do tries to understand what factors influence our ability to remember someone’s face and be able to identify them using their face. For example we know that people are better at recognising faces from videos rather than photos and we know that they are better with same race faces than those of a different race them. We also know that some people are excellent recognisers, so called ‘super-recognisers’ whilst others have real difficulty recognising people (people with prosopagnosia). My research is mostly done in the lab using computer based tasks and sometimes we use an eye tracker so that we  know what people are looking at when they complete our face recognition tasks. We hope that our research helps us to understand every day face recognition so that we can use what we learn to help the police improve their eyewitness identification procedures and support people with prosopagnosia to have better face recognition ability.