I joined the Edinburgh Napier Psychology team as a Teaching Associate in September 2017. I have been teaching and facilitating learning at the undergraduate level for the past four years and continue to work hard on my pedagogical knowledge and skills at Edinburgh Napier. At the postgraduate level, I have co-authored a support workbook for doctoral students beginning to teach.
I am currently writing up my PhD thesis which explores distress associated with psychosis experiences. It is a mixed methods project in which I investigate the psychological factors related to the maintenance of distress on the one hand, and experiential accounts of psychosis generated in in-depth interviews with a small clinical population on the other. I have presented my work to both academic and practitioner audiences and am committed to the development of clinical practice through research. While my current research is dedicated to better understanding and helping address the experience of distress in psychosis, I am also passionate about mental health and wellbeing in general (e.g. self-regulation and mindfulness).
While conducting my doctoral research I have volunteered in different settings within the NHS. In that capacity, I have produced an ‘outcomes report’ for a community mental health team on dialectical behavioural therapy for emotionally unstable personality disorder. I also conducted a service evaluation of a behaviour change clinic for men-who-have-sex-with-men.
My wider research interests relate to clinical, developmental and cognitive psychology, but I am particularly interested in mental health difficulties, attachment theory, emotion regulation and metacognition.