I am a Departmental Lecturer within the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, currently responsible for teaching two courses in the Msc in Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology – on Mind & Culture, and Quantitative Methods in Anthropology – along with a course on Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology for the BA in Human Sciences. I have always been attracted to interdisciplinary studies: I have a BA in Archaeology & Anthropology from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Manchester, and a PhD from the Institute of Cognition & Culture, Queen’s University Belfast. After completing my PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant on developmentally appropriate practice at the Department of Early Childhood Education, Stranmillis University College, and as a Research Fellow on social and emotional learning at the Centre for Effective Education, Queen’s University Belfast.

My current research interests include the development of children’s normative awareness, the anthropology of children’s peer groups, the structure of everyday language use in a variety of social networks, and the co-evolution of language, theory of mind, and morality. I am keen to find educational applications for evolutionary research in the area of children’s social and emotional learning.

I submitted my PhD thesis, entitled Young children’s reporting of peers’ behaviour, in May 2009. My research was on the development of young children's social communication from an interactionist perspective, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. I undertook an observational study of young children's behavioural reporting in two Belfast preschools. I also carried out a couple of simple recall experiments, and analyzed instances of tattling and gossip in the CHILDES and eHRAF databases.