Personal Statement
My research interests fall within the area of lifespan developmental cognitive neuroscience. I obtained my PhD at the University of Toronto (2011). My doctoral research, which was partially funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), focused on understanding socio-cognitive alterations in Parkinson’s Disease patients and their spouses. Following my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute/University of Toronto (2011-2019). For two years I was funded by a CIHR postdoctoral fellowship to conduct a project on the interpersonal effects of expressive suppression, an extension of my doctoral investigations on emotional expressivity in Parkinson’s Disease patients. Following a lectureship at Cardiff University (2020-2022), I joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool in October 2022, where I am part of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience Group.

Research Overview
The overarching goal of my work is to characterise age-specific and age-invariant neuroplasticity processes underpinning positive adjustment to environmental challenges and, thus, facilitate the development of more personalised interventions to enhance psychological resilience. To this end, I use behavioural, neuroimaging, transcriptomic and polygenic risk methods with neurologically intact and clinical populations. Many of my investigations draw on longitudinal and cross-sectional neuroimaging and genetic population datasets of typically and atypically developing individuals.