Profile

I live in Liverpool with my Husband and our cat Saffy (she’s black and look like Toothless from How to train Your Dragon). We have also recently adopted twins so have our hands full

I am a huge fan of all things true crime drama related, I love a good whodunnit, whether this be on TV or some classic reading (or audiobook).

I play in the university concert band, so am a musician at heart, with my instrument of choice being the bass clarinet.

In trying to wind-down from a day’s work, I like to cook and bake, I almost made it onto an earlier series of great british bake off!

I have a passion for learning, so aim to develop my own skills, lately this has been focussed on pottery

My work time is split between teaching and research and enjoy both aspects of my job role.

I teach students all the way through their undergraduate degrees and at postgraduate level on topics such as how the brain works, how our social skills change as we age, how we learn (and some of the problems with using technology in schools).

In terms of research my focus from my PhD is on maths and numbers. I look at how we learn numbers from a young age, some of the problems which may happen (math anxiety being one of them). I also make use of a big magnet called TMS to zap the brain to see how this changes the brain activity when we are learning a task.

I say this because in Academia we need to be flexible. We are like chameleons in adapting to different challenges. I like to have a plan and schedule things, but often this needs to change due to an extra meeting or something I had not considered might happen.

An example of this would be that as part of my research I work a lot with schools, and parents and sometimes meetings and arrangements do not go as smoothly as we would like. In relation to teaching my typical day here involves a lot of talking and exploring our pretty campus here at Liverpool Hope. This could be to a small group of students in a tutorial, all the way to a large class of around 250 students.

Other parts of my day may be spent in the childlab working on projects with our research assistants, and planning our next experiments. I have recently supported 4 students with their Nuffield Student Summer Internships, and among these are a CREST Gold award winner (applicants from the NW region most welcome…ask your teachers!).

There is always time to wind down, so I am also part of a department badminton team who play a few times a week (we are quite competitive).