About me

I am a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sheffield, and Director of Postgraduate Taught in the School of Psychology until September 2028, where I run the MSc Psychological Research Methods and MSc Cognitive Neuroscience programmes.

I study how performance and cognition change over a lifetime: how we learn and develop expertise, when in a career peak performance arrives, and how we experience age-related decline. I ask this of data that already exists — the long careers of chess, basketball and football players, and the clinical record of the NHS.

In expertise research, I use those datasets to test how practice, cognitive ability and environment interact across a career, and how superhuman machine analysis has changed the way elite humans play. In dementia research, I use electronic health records and clinical natural language processing — across millions of NHS clinical records — to study how the disease progresses, how it is treated, and who is at risk, including how loneliness and social isolation shape the trajectory after diagnosis.

The two strands are less separate than they look. I learn a great deal from carrying methods between them: causal methods developed in clinical work I test on skill development, and what that testing teaches me about how and when an effect really holds goes back into the clinic with me.

That applied side is now a service evaluation of social-isolation and loneliness screening at the Working Age Memory Clinic (Sheffield Teaching Hospitals), and the BACP-funded SEAM-10 pilot, led by Dr Emma Broglia, which runs across UK and US university counselling services.

My publication list is on the publications page, and is kept current on Google Scholar and ORCID.

For most of the publications, I share my data and R code using OSF.

Roles and responsibilities

  • Director of Postgraduate Taught, School of Psychology (2025 – 2028) — oversight of three MSc programmes and 18 module organisers.
  • Co-Lead, Health Data Analytics and Informatics, Sheffield Neuroscience Institute (2022 – present; Executive Board member).
  • Deputy Director of Recruitment, School of Psychology (2022 – 2025).
  • USIC Link Tutor, School of Psychology (2022 – 2025) — liaison with the University of Sheffield International College.
  • Director, MSc Research Methods with Advanced Statistics (2022 – 2023).
  • External examiner: MSc Computational and Corpus Linguistics, University of Manchester (2025 – present); MRes Research Methods and Foundations of Neuroscience, Goldsmiths, University of London (2022 – present).
  • Associate Editor, Primenjena Psihologija (2023 – 2025).

If you are uncertain how to pronounce my name, press listen button on the google translate link or listen Manchester United fans singing my name