Profile

Biography

I am an interdisciplinary Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media within the School of Arts and Creative Technologies. My research and teaching interests span different areas of the school but are primarily driven by an interest in the role of (new) technology, media and music in improving health, wellbeing and access and the relationship between different modalities (e.g. sound, haptics) and storytelling within these new media forms.

I joined the University of York in 2004 for my undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering with Music Technology Systems. During my undergraduate degree I took a module on Interface Design and became fascinated by User-Centred Design and Psychology, so followed this with an MSc in Human-Centred Interactive Technologies. I then combined my interests in HCI and Music for my PhD in Computer Science, where I investigated the effect of music on transcription typing performance and experience. At various points since 2010 I have been employed as a Research Associate in CS. In these roles, I mostly worked on accessibility-focused HCI projects (including the EU funded i2web project; and most recently the Innovate UK funded SoundTact project). My roles within these projects have been quite varied, but I was typically been involved in designing and performing user evaluations (with blind and partially sighted users, and with web developers); running requirements interviews; and getting extremely lost in Milan. 

I then taught in CS for 2 years, before moving to the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media (TFTI) in 2015 as an Associate Lecturer in Interactive Media. In 2017 I became a lecturer in IM within TFTI on a teaching-focused basis, primarily teaching programming, empirical research methods and supervising projects. In 2021, I was a co-Investigator on the Co-Musicate project and also took a 2 year Research Fellowship secondment, funded by XR Stories, to focus on research and develop a research agenda within a project called ‘Destigmatising Disability in Past, Present and Future Stories’. In 2023 I returned to the School of Arts & Creative Technologies (ACT) as a lecturer on an academic research and teaching basis, where I continue to teach programming and empirical methods, but also teach about disability and accessibility and am continuing my research in this space.