I’m an Associate Professor in Developmental Psychology. I lead internationally-recognised research into the factors that shape anxiety across development. My work focuses on how anxiety is transmitted between generations, how cognitive biases influence emotional disorders, and how we can harness this knowledge to design and evaluate interventions to improve mental health outcomes in children and adolescents. I have a strong interest in school mental health, particularly developing interventions for emotionally-based school avoidance and measuring the implementation and impact of whole school and college approaches to mental health. I currently receive funding from the National Institute for Health Research, Economic and Social Research Council and The National Lottery Community Fund.

I received my D.Phil in Psychiatry from the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford in 2008. I was awarded a highly competitive Medical Research Council studentship to study novel cognitive bias modification methods in sub-clinical and clinical populations with anxiety and depression. I then joined the Child Anxiety Theory and Treatment Lab at the University of Sussex as a postdoctoral researcher on an ESRC funded project examining the intergenerational transmission of anxiety.

Between 2010 and 2014, I held a postdoctoral and Lecturer role at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. During this time, I co-led an MRC-funded international study on genomic predictors of psychological therapy response in children with anxiety, and led an MRC grant investigating attentional bias modification as a potential "cognitive vaccine" for childhood anxiety.

I re-joined the University of Sussex in 2015. My ongoing research is dedicated to understanding, and preventing childhood anxiety through evidence-based, developmentally informed approaches. I am a member of the School of Psychology senior management team and am currently Subject Group Lead for Developmental Psychology, Deputy Director for Postgraduate Research and an elected member of Senate representing the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine.  I am also Co-Lead of the Sussex Foundation Partnership Trust School Mental Health Research Team Clinic.