I graduated with my undergraduate degree in Psychology and French from the University of Strathclyde in 1998 and then went on to work as a research assistant in the Psychology department at the University of Stirling. I then obtained my PhD in Psychology from the University of Glasgow in 2004, with a thesis entitled 'Are there developmental differences in face processing?'. I carried out a range of experiments to investigate whether there are qualitative or quantitative differences in face processing between children and adults and largely concluded that children process faces in the same ways as adults and become more proficient as they get older.

I then worked as a post-doctoral researcher from 2004-2007 at the University of Stirling on children's learning and communication before working as a researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University looking at ways to improve the reliability of children's face identification skills from lineups. I took up my lecturing post at UWS in January 2012. 

I am interested in the applications of face processing to the area of eyewitness identification. I have interests in whether child eyewitnesses are as reliable as adults and whether children use the same information and processes when recognising people. I have recently become interested in the area of voice recognition and the parallels between face and voice recognition, both developmentally and in an applied context.

My teaching interests lie in Research Methods and Statistics for Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Forensic Psychology and Developmental Psychology. 

Recent projects have focused on how well children can identify faces and voices from both target-absent and target-present line-ups and what may cause the different patterns observed for the different line-ups.  I am carrying out research with nursery teachers looking at the longer term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's social and emotional development. 

The goal of my research is to evaluate and understand the reasons why children may differ from adults in terms of face and voice identification – are these tasks that children just get better at as they develop cognitively or is there an underlying qualitative difference between the ways children and adults perceive and remember people - with a view to developing processes to improve the reliability of eyewitness and earwitness identification.

My current teaching activities and interests lie in the areas of Research Methods and Statistics for Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Forensic Psychology and Developmental Psychology. 

I am currently carrying out research to explore how we can improve the student experience of learning research methods and statistics which is a particularly challenging topic for undergraduates.

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