I am an Assistant Professor in Physical Geography, specialising in Quaternary Science. My PhD research at the University of Hull explored anthropogenic responses to changing environmental conditions in prehistoric Orkney, primarily via pollen analysis. My post-doctoral research, also at Hull, developed and applied a standard methodology to test one of the fundamental assumptions underlying pollen analysis. Following a brief spell working for English Heritage (now Historic England), I spent two years working at Queen's University Belfast as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded FRAGSUS (Fragility and Sustainability in restricted island environments: adaptation, culture change and collapse in prehistory) project before returning to the University of Hull as a Teaching Fellow. I joined Coventry University as a Lecturer in 2017, and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2019. 

My research focuses on the complex relationships between people and their physical environment - both the impacts that people have on the environment, and how environmental change shapes societies. I investigate these questions on Holocene timescales, primarily via pollen analysis, though I am also interested in the potential of palaeoenvironmental data for understanding current environmental issues and informing their management.

In addition to current projects that employ novel palaeoenvironmental approaches to understand ‘big picture’ questions relating to climate change, biodiversity conservation and flood management, my research also focuses on the fundamental assumptions of pollen analysis, particularly those that underlie algebraic models of pollen dispersal and deposition which are applied to reconstruct past vegetation dynamics. Other current projects involve testing and refining some of these assumptions to enable application of the models in a wider range of environments (e.g. fluvial) and geographic locations (e.g. the Mediterranean).