My academic life in Australia included completion of a doctorate in experimental psycholinguistics within the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science in 2002, followed by a Psychology Lectureship at the University of Wollongong in 2003.  I then moved to the UK in order to take up a postdoctoral research position within the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge in 2004. I moved to a Psychology Lectureship at the University of Manchester in 2007, where I currently conduct research within the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Group (NARU).

My research interests focus on multiple aspects of normal and disordered language processing.  I have primarily considered normal reading and the way in which this ability can be disrupted subsequent to brain damage, in particular by illnesses such as stroke and dementia.

The theoretical context of this work is provided by connectionist models of language processing.  These models allow for consideration of the impact of systematic individual differences upon normal reading behaviour and also of the consequences that these may have for performance seen after brain damage.

I am currently validating and extending my previous work using neuroimaging techniques and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.  In the future, I aim to apply the predictions of connectionist models to the processes involved in the very first stages of literacy acquisition, using behavioural and electrophysiological measures.

PSYC31242: Understading Dementia:  Brain and Behaviour

MSc in Neuroimaging for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience

Current Doctoral Students:

Kat Gore

Niki Drossinos Sancho

Josie Kearney

Czime Litwinczuk

Sasha Johns

Shuo Yan

Current Collaborators:

Professor Karalyn Patterson

Professor Matt Lambon Ralph

Dr Lauren Cloutman

Dr Holly Robson

Dr Rachel Holland

Dr Lauren Cloutman