I arrived in Aberystwyth in October 2014 to start working as a statistics lecturer.  Before that, I spent 11 years in Nottingham, completing a PhD in Statistical Shape Analysis in 2007 and spending 6 ½ years as a statistics postdoc on a multidisciplinary plant biology project.

My research interests are on biological applications of statistics.  This includes species distribution modelling (dolphins and Curlew), network biology and statistical shape analysis/biological geometric morphometrics.

I currently have two PhD students working on dolphin datasets, one on an observational dataset of the dolphins in Cardigan Bay, West Wales, and the other using network theory to analyse a dataset of the dolphins off the east coast of Scotland.  Since arriving in Aberystwyth, I have co-supervised two other PhD projects, one on using ordinary differential equations to model tick-borne diseases in ecological communities and another on bacterial genetics.

I was involved in the ECHOES project between December 2019 and June 2023, which was looking at the effect of climate change on bird coastal communities on both sides of the Irish Sea.  I was lead author on a paper about the overwintering distributions of Curlew in Britain and Ireland that over the period 2003 to 2019 that made use of land use data from satellites and environmental variables to assess the habitat preferences of Curlew between November and February.

I am now starting to realign with the shape analysis I studied for my PhD, and am moving more towards research problems involving landmark-based geometric morphometrics, with a particular focus on the mammalian skeleton.