Profile

I am a PhD student in Cambridge. I am originally from Canada, the land of maple syrup and Carly Rae Jepsen. I have watched all 10 seasons of Friends more times than I’d like to admit, and I strongly believe that as an adult it’s just as important to be silly as it is to be serious. I know many terrible jokes, and I love to sing (whether on my own, at karaoke, or when cycling into work). If I could have a superpower, I would DEFINITELY like to have the power to teleport places.

My field of research is called neuropsychological rehabilitation – it’s a lot to say, I know! This is a very small area of work around the world, meaning very few people work in it. This area focuses on helping people with a brain injury – such as from a road traffic accident, a stroke (brain bleed), or an infection to the brain. After a brain injury people can have physical difficulties (such as a broken leg, vision changes), cognitive difficulties (poor memory, hard to pay attention) or emotional difficulties (feeling sad a lot or worrying too much). I focus on the emotional difficulties – it’s very common after a brain injury to feel down or depressed, but their injury makes it harder to get better. I am trying to develop a treatment for low mood in brain injury that is sensitive to the cognitive and physical changes they have.

7:00am – My first alarm goes off. I always ignore it.

7:30am – I drag myself out of bed, trying my best not to be a zombie, to get ready for work.

9:00am – I cycle to work – in the spring time I cycle by cows on the way in 🙂

9:15am – Emails. So many emails.

11:00am – I meet my research participants – people with a brain injury – and we have tea and biscuits and a laugh, and start talking about their week. We talk about what was easy to do in the past week (maybe seeing a film!), and what was hard (having a disagreement with a friend), and we talk about ways to keep up with the things that are going well and work on solving the tough things together.

12:00pm – I teach my participants a little bit about the brain, and how after it is injured we are more likely to fall into bad habits (like not leaving the house for a few days or avoiding people) and how this affects how we feel. My participants learn new ways to stop feeling distracted, and how to recognise when they are falling into bad habits.

1:00pm – After my participants leave, I try and think about what went well in the group and how I can make the work easier to understand for when I next meet my participants.

2:00pm – I try and do some data analysis – basically I work on my computer with a bunch of numbers and try and make pretty pictures out of them. I also try to find important patterns between those numbers – for example, does being worried about the future relate to how often you see your friends?

3:45pm – Tea time! My work has tea time every day and it is a VERY important part of my day.

4:15pm – I try and prepare for the next day – create the materials for the next group of participants, change any documents, and make sure to remind my participants – after brain injury, it’s easy to forget things!

6:00pm – If I’m not going to a lecture or event in Cambridge, I head home! I like to make pasta for dinner a lot 🙂