I completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Manchester in 2008 and subsequently worked as a research fellow in the University's Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit. In 2013, I took up a six-month Visiting Scholar position at Stanford University before returning briefly to Manchester. In this year, I was also awarded the BNS Elizabeth Warrington Prize for outstanding early-career research.

In 2014, I came to Edinburgh as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology. I was appointed as a lecturer in 2018 and was promoted to Reader in 2022.

I have served as Meetings Secretary of the British Neuropsychological Society and co-edited a special issue of the journal Neuropsychologia on the topic of semantic cognition.

Most of my papers can be accessed by clicking on the links on the right of this page. A full list of my publications is also available on my Google scholar page.

My research is concerned with the processes of semantic cognition – i.e., the ways in which we (a) maintain a store of conceptual knowledge about objects, words and people and (b) use executive control processes to access this information in a flexible, task-appropriate manner. I explore this using a variety of techniques, including:

• Case-series neuropsychological investigations, primarily of patients with semantic dementia and semantic deficits following stroke
• Computational linguistic analyses (e.g., latent semantic analysis)
• Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects
• Functional neuroimaging studies
• Connectionist computational models

I am also interested in the ways in which semantic knowledge interacts with other cognitive and linguistic processes.