I graduated with a BA(Hons) Psychology from the University of Sheffield in 1998. I completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Imperial College, which included a psychopharmacological project regarding the effect of the D2 receptor antagonist sulpiride on working memory and learning in normal volunteers. This led to studying for a PhD at the University of Cambridge with Professor Tony Holland at the Section of Developmental Psychiatry and Professor Adrian Owen at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences unit (2001-2005). My PhD was entitled “The neural basis of hunger and satiety in Prader-Willi syndrome”.
Following my PhD, I moved to Cardiff University to start a post-doc with Dr Ulrich von Hecker, studying “Attentional control in sad mood” (2005-2006), funded by the ESRC. We were awarded for a one year grant from the ESRC to continue this work, applying neuroimaging techniques to the study of reasoning in depression (2006-2007).
In 2007, I then embarked on a three-year Research Fellow position funded by Wales Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (WICN). This gave me the opportunity to work on a number of projects, both extending the work on neuroimaging of reasoning, as well as returning to the study of ‘excessive motivation’, using neuroimaging (fMRI & MEG) to study the motivation to eat.
I am now continuing in this vein, working as a post-doc researcher with the Nutrition and Behaviour Unit within the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol on a BBSRC-DRINC funded grant, entitled "Understanding decisions about portion size: The key to acceptable foods that reduce energy intake?".
School of Experimental Psychology