Profile

I’m 29 and live at the coast, close to Newcastle. I’m a big foodie and love cooking and eating out. I also love to travel and particularly love a busy city break! At the moment I’m hoping to travel to 30 countries before I turn 30, I’ve been to 25 so far and have some more trips planned. My favourite places I’ve been to are Lisbon in Portugal and I did an amazing trip around Japan last year. In my free time I like to listen to podcasts and watch TV – particularly crime dramas and true crime.

The amazing view from just by my house.

On top of Shibuya Sky in Tokyo, Japan. An observatory on the 46th floor.

The research centre that I work in looks at how taking supplements (like vitamins) and what you eat can improve your brain performance. I’m a Research Fellow, which means I mostly manage a team of staff who run these studies. But I also run my own research projects too. Most of my work at the moment looks at different mushrooms like Lion’s Mane mushroom 🍄‍. I also do a lot of work with different extracts from plants, fruits and vegetables 🍇. We look to see what effect taking these have on our brain function, gut health and different things in our blood 🧠.

To do this, me and the team run intervention studies where participants come into the research centre, they take the supplement (or a placebo) that I give them and complete a number of tests to measure these outcomes. These are often quite large studies with 100+ participants and require them to come into the research centre multiple times over a few months. Once they’re complete I analyse all of the data to see if taking this supplement had any effect on the different outcome measures. After this I write up the results to be published. Sometimes I also talk about these results at a conference or I’ve also done some radio and TV interviews too.

Within my role I also teach our students about different areas of Psychology (as a Lecturer). At the moment I teach students on our Foundation, Undergraduate and Masters degrees. I teach very varied topics – this year I’m teaching Biological Psychology, Social Psychology and careers in Psychology. These lectures are a bit different from how you learn at school, particularly because sometimes I teach 400+ students at the same time!

I normally get into work a little before 9am and I typically do bits of different things each day. I’m a Principal Investigator (lead researcher) for different trials in our research centre, so I check in with my team to make sure everything is running smoothly and answer any questions that they have.

I also have some of my own projects running that I run with my friend and colleague Sarah – a few different studies looking at Lion’s Mane mushrooms. For this we have participants who come into the research centre and complete different mood questionnaires. And then they take a mushroom supplement (or placebo capsule) at home and return in a months time. I also send lots of emails to try and recruit more participants into the studies.

I teach students on different modules on our Psychology courses, so even if I’m not teaching on that day I have a lot of preparation work to do, like making lecture slides. This semester I teach on a Tuesday and Thursday, so on these days a big chunk of my day is actually lecturing. This semester I should only have ~100 students at a time, but last year I taught 400+ students at once!

Around these roles I also have a lot of different meetings. I supervise students for their dissertation, so I meet with them normally once a week. Then I have meetings with those in my team, the department and wider in the university. A lot of the projects we run are for big companies across the world, so I’ll have calls with them to discuss current and future projects. Once a project completes, I analyse the data and write this up to be published in a scientific journal. Sometimes I also get to go to different conferences where you can present your work as a poster or a talk.