Profile

I live in Coventry with my fiancée.

I play lots of video-games, both for work and for fun; my favourite games are Mass Effect, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Animal Crossing.

I love pizza, Indian food, and lasagne (my fiancée makes the best lasagne in the world) and I am a vegetarian.

I love sport, especially football. I support Coventry City. I also like snooker, skateboarding and motor racing.

I love science fiction and fantasy books and films. Every year my fiancée and I have a Lord of the Rings marathon near Christmas.

I have 40 pairs of shoes!

My pronouns are he/him.

In my job I try to find out if video-games can improve mental abilities. Your brain is always processing information and it’s very complicated inside your head, but you don’t even realise it’s happening!

You use many mental abilities when you play video-games because they make you think about lots of things at the same time. You might have to move around, do something in a time-limit, look for things, follow objectives, or all sorts of other things. You do these things naturally when you play the game, but all sorts of processes are at work in your brain that you aren’t even thinking about!

Often when we get older our brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. We might be more forgetful or find it harder to do things like driving. My current work is with older people, and I am hoping to show that we can make our mental ability better in old age by playing video-games.

I get people to do tests on a computer that measure their mental ability, and then they learn to play a video-game for a few weeks. When they have gotten better at playing the game I test them again to see if their mental ability is better than it was when they started.

Most of the people I work with have never played a video-game before, so it’s a lot of fun watching them try something new and sometimes even keep it as a new hobby!

In the future I’d like to research more personal issues in video-games, like how they can be used to help those who are lonely, or people who are part of marginalised groups like the LGBT+ community.

I wake up early and always make sure to have a good breakfast because it helps me to think all day!

I start my day at my desk answering e-mails, as there are always lots of things going on at the University that I work at and we need to keep up to date with everything.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays I teach Psychology to University students. We usually do this in classrooms but right now we are doing it by video using our computers. I teach all sorts of subjects to do with Psychology but I enjoy teaching about my research the most.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I focus on my research. This can include lots of things. Some days I spend all day writing about what I’ve done, sometimes I go and do experiments with people using video-games, and sometimes I use special computer software to investigate the things I have found.

Whatever day of the week it is I am always very busy!