About Me

I got into autism research as a consequence of a phenomenal string of coincidences, far too long to list here. The short version is that I was: 1) diagnosed autistic as a child; then 2) bumped into claims, as part of my undergraduate linguistics degree, about what autistic people were incapable of, some of which seemed highly likely to be true (that we do pragmatics in the way other people do pragmatics) and some of which seemed highly unlikely to be true (that we don’t having emotions or care about others); before 3) getting very interested in metaphor comprehension in autism for a bit (accidentally, and primarily due to an ongoing and very one-sided battle I was having at the time with a pragmatics lecturer about the value of neuroscience in linguistics research).

After my undergrad and masters, I drifted by chance into doing diagrams-related research as an RA for a bit, first from a cognitive science perspective and then from a science communication one. Eventually (through great luck, and a leap of faith on the part of my supervisors) I got a PhD studying, broadly, social communication in autism from the autistic perspective. I’m now back, again, to doing something a bit random (midrash, linguistics, creativity, and as much neurodiversity paradigm stuff as I can wedge in there) for my current postdoc. My long term goal is to stay in autism research, but I’m very happy to meander a bit on the way there - every detour I’ve taken so far has given me fresh ideas, approaches, and methods to bring back with me into the autism space.

Technically, my academic background is in linguistics and in clinical brain sciences. At this point, though, I’ve dabbled in quite a few other areas of the cognitive science umbrella: psychology, informatics, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, AI, and philosophy. I enjoy learning new research methods and analysis techniques, and am eternally delighted by clever research design, especially mixed methods or creative/arts-based approaches. I also like theory development. I’m interested in interesting or novel framings of things, the intersection of art and science, and “what-if”, blue skies research and debate – none of which is strictly related to theory development, admittedly, but which feel adjacent.

I’m also really passionate about good, clear science communication. This is partly due to my work with the Winton Centre, who were great advocates of this - but it’s also because I love talking about my research, and other people’s research that I think is cool. If you would like me to give a talk (or appear on your podcast, or deliver some training for you, or do a webinar, or…), please do check out my Consultancy & Speaking page.

In my spare time I knit (and do a variety of other arts-type things), write weird fiction, and am tormented by a horrible beast that haunts my home.

Picture of the horrible beast, for tax purposes:

Current Funding

My current postdoc is funded by The John Templeton Foundation. Information on the funders of past projects is available on the relevant project page.

Conflicts of Interest

None. If I ever acquire any, they’ll appear here.