I am a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at UWE Bristol, where I teach research methods and lead the Year 1 undergraduate programmes for Psychology and Psychology with Criminology. I am also a Visiting Fellow in Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick.
If there’s a thread running through my research, it’s a fairly critical eye on research methods themselves — whether the way we test a theory, model a decision, or evaluate an intervention actually stands up to scrutiny. That’s shown up as model-recovery work checking whether popular dual-process theories of category learning can really be told apart by the data used to support them, a paper asking whether Human-Robot Interaction research is adequately powered to replicate, and evidence reviews and meta-analyses assessing whether public health messaging — on alcohol labelling, or “social norms” style campaigns — actually works. The topics vary (categorisation, decision-making under uncertainty, human-robot interaction, public health) but they’re often really an excuse to ask “how would we actually know?”
I started out in mathematics rather than psychology, which probably explains the instinct. I’ve taught research methods since my PhD, and it’s why this site also has a growing Resources section rather than only a list of papers.
I’m always keen to hear from prospective PhD students interested in research methods, categorisation, decision-making, or the other topics above — if that’s you, please get in touch.