I am Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Bristol. I’m Co-Head of the Bristol Interaction Group and Lead of the Diverse-Ability Interaction Lab (Dive Lab.)

My field of research is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), my team and I investigate how HCI as an applied field of inquiry can contribute to making human society more inclusive of disabled people.  

We start from the premises that a) an inclusive future is not only desirable but one that should be actively designed, b) that disabled and non-disabled people must be actively involved in co-designing said future, and c) that bias toward particular forms and notions of technology in traditional HCI paradigms, is a detriment to inclusion because they overlook the richness and diversity of human abilities and experiences.

We are particularly interested in exploring how insights and principles from multisensory interaction, crossmodal perception and embodied cognition could be used to design more inclusive interactions between disabled and non-disabled people. We use a mixed-methods approach in our research, combining theory with field work, co-design, and controlled studies and evaluation.

Between 2023 and 2028, I have been awarded a 5-years ERC Consolidator Grant for the project Inclusive Cross-sensory Social Play: Towards a new paradigm of assistive technology for early development of blind and visually impaired children (inclusiveXplay). 

Between 2016 and 2021, I held a 5-years EPSRC Early Career Fellowship which supported my research into inclusion, co-design, crossmodal perception and multisensory interaction. In this fellowship, I focused on ways of applying the above principles to design and research education technologies that can improve the inclusion of visually-impaired childrenwhen they learn alongside their sighted peers in mainstream schools.