I am a Teaching Associate in the Department of Psychology.

I have recently completed a Daphne Jackson Fellowship at RHUL, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which has enabled me to return to science after a break in my career.

After completing a PhD in psychology at the University of St Andrews, I worked in post-doctoral research positions at St Andrews, Durham and Sheffield universities, and then as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool and as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University.

I am interested primarily in memory. Much of my research has explored how memory is mediated by the brain. This has included studying patients with brain damage and memory loss in order to identify which aspects of memory are normally supported by which regions of the brain.

My recent fellowship research has focused on eyewitness identification. This study investigated whether verbal overshadowing (the detrimental effect of describing the perpetrator of a crime on subsequent identification of the perpetrator) occurs in both young and older adults. The study also investigated whether the confidence and speed with which identifications are made predict the accuracy of the identification in both young and older adults. The world population is getting older, and as a result the number of older victims of crime is expected to increase. It is therefore important to understand eyewitness identification throughout the lifespan so procedures can be developed that enable victims of crime of all ages to provide evidence as accurately and reliably as possible. This will lead to better identifications of perpetrators of crime while reducing the number of misidentifications of innocent people as perpetrators.