Overview
I am a Research Fellow, responsible for coordinating interdisciplinary projects that seek to address social problems through digital innovations. As a team we design and develop technologies and conduct out-of-the-lab, qualitative and quantitative research to make advances in social problems such as: health and wellbeing, privacy and security, social identities and loneliness. I have a particular interest in digital accessibility for older people.
Research Keywords:
- Health and Wellbeing
- Cyberpsychology
- Social Support
- Loneliness
- Ageing identity
- Inter/multidisciplinary research
Current projects:
2020-2022- EPSRC, Researcher co-investigator, “Social and Emotional Resilience for the Vulnerable Impacted by COVID-19 Emergency” (£400,000). This project aims to design and implement a digital platform for research on and support of emotional well-being of older people (>50) impacted by COVID-19 social distancing.
2018-2023-EPSRC, Researcher, “Secure, Adaptive, Usable Software Engineering”. The aim of this platform grant is to support strategic, multi-disciplinary, crosscutting research activities that underpin modern software engineering of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems, which themselves inhabit a complex and changing socio-technical world.
Previous projects:
STRETCH
http://stretchproject.org/index.html
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/5055/5055.html
-EPSRC, Researcher Co-Investigator, “Socio-technical Resilience for Targeted Community Healthcare” (STRETCH), EP/P01013X/1. This project aims to help coordinate older people’s “circles of support” (from relatives and neighbours, to the voluntary sector, social workers, paid carers, and medical professionals) with wearable and smart home technologies to enhance the social and technical resilience of the older person and their circles of support.
-QUEX Institute, Researcher, “Other Ways to Connect? The Social Connectedness of Older People and the Impact of Technology.” This initiator project aimed to understand the design challenges of technologies used by older people for social connections.
–EPSRC, Researcher, Privacy Dynamics: Learning from the Wisdom of Groups: This project drew on social identity theory to understand how individuals learn from or benefit from their group memberships in order to manage privacy when using pervasive and ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones and lifelogging cameras.
-PhD (Murdoch University): My PhD research examined how activists and advocates adapt their identity rhetoric strategically in order to resist negative stereotypes (e.g. about being “professional protesters” or “extremists”), and how some nominally politically supportive people engage in “strategic inaction” in order to manage reputational concerns.
Qualifications
BA (Psychology, Philosophy) with Honours, Murdoch University, Western Australia (2009)
PhD (Psychology), Murdoch University, Western Australia (2014)