I am a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate (PDTA) within the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. I teach topics related to Social Psychology and Individual Differences across a range of modules and years here at Royal Holloway and have also taught a range of research methods and statistics lectures. My main research area is gene-culture coevolution, which considers how evolutionary mechanisms, social learning mechanisms and cultural differences shape how we think and act in certain situations.

I completed my PhD here at Royal Holloway, supervised by Prof. Ryan McKay and Prof. Charles Efferson. This PhD was interested in how we make social decisions, including when to coordinate on a social norm (e.g., should I wear formal wear to a conference?) and when to cooperate (e.g., should I offer my fiend a lift to work?). We looked at these with economic games in lab studies (see publications) and with agent-based models, which allow us to see the actions of theoretical, computerised agents over thousands of generations in a quick turn around - like a ‘snapshot’ of evolution!

My work with students often focuses on understanding sexual perceptions and sexual jealousy from evolutionary perspectives. This is linked to my project investigating the sexual overperception bias. Put simply, this is when men may over-interpret cues of friendliness and politeness as sexual interest from women (see Projects for more information).

From an evolutionary perspective, teaching is rare in the animal kingdom, only being observed in intelligent, ultra-social mammals. It should be no surprise that teaching is highly important to humans, as it underlies our cumulative cultures. There are so many skills and rules that underlie human society that must be passed down from the generations before us. Interestingly, we are also perhaps the only species to combine teaching with a sense of play – why is learning preferable when it is also fun? My pedagogic work focuses on the importance of gamification, which is the use of elements borrowed from games to track student progress and encourage engagement in an entertaining way. Specifically, I study student perceptions on what works well and what needs improving when we gamify course content.