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Role:
Department staff:
- Qualifications:BSocSc, MAppPsy, PhD, FHEA
- Position:Senior Lecturer in Psychology
- Department:HAS - Health and Social Sciences
- Telephone:+44117 965 6261
About me
I completed my PhD in associative learning and derived relational responding at The University of Waikato, New Zealand, while holding contracts as a teaching and research assistant, and contract lecturer, teaching across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes (research methods, behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, psychometric measurement). This was followed by fixed-term contracts at the University of Otago, New Zealand, as a Lecturer in Psychology, teaching Community Behaviour Analysis; and at The University of Auckland as a Research Fellow on the large longitudinal child development study, Growing Up in New Zealand (GUINZ). In 2013, I moved to the UK, taking up a position at Bath Spa University, where I was a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and the Programme Leader for Combined Psychology Programmes. In that position, I taught and/or led modules in the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes (introductory psychology, behavioural psychology, developmental psychology, research methods, neuropsychological rehabilitation) and supervised dissertation research (UG, PG, PhD) before moving to UWE in November 2023. At UWE, I will be co-leading the Introduction to Psychology module.
My research interests are broad but have developed into two programmes of research. I have a broad interest in learning theory and contextual behavioural science with publications in a range of areas, including behavioural decision-making, associative learning, and animal welfare. At present, my interests lie in the learning biases and their implications for individual and group-decision making processes in relation to societal concerns such as climate change and public health issues. The second area of research relates to improving mental wellbeing in areas of student mental health (including scale validation), and the potential for citizen science projects to provide social opportunities (in the context of social prescribing) for individuals with mental health difficulties. I am a member of the Psychological Sciences Research Group.
Area of expertise
My interests are broad but include several areas relating to learning and behavioural processes, and contextual behavioural science, particularly associative learning and behavioural decision making, and their contributions to understanding and addressing societal-level issues.