I am a research fellow working on translating insights from collective animal behaviour into applications in swarm robotics. These include monitoring (hazardous) environments and manipulating large numbers of particles on the micro or nanoscale. 

My experimental work is at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and I have a base in the department of Engineering Mathematics (collective dynamics group) at the University of Bristol. I am part of Dr Sabine Hauert's 'swarm engineering' group.

Prior to my current position I spent a year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department, working on social networks of Stegodyphus social spiders, with Prof Noa Pinter-Wollman.

My PhD research was concerned with the exploration and decision-making behaviour of house-hunting Temnothorax ants, within the field of behavioural ecology and complexity sciences, as an EPSRC-funded PhD student. I was interested in how the behavioural interactions of individual worker ants allows collective problem-solving abilities to emerge.

In between science degrees, I studied economics and worked in financial regulation (risk management), which is where I first began to think about collective animal behaviour.