Profile

My favourite games are nice relaxing games that you can easily spend your entire day playing, such as The Sims (though sometimes that can be chaotic and anything but relaxing), or Animal Crossing. I am no good at being the ‘bad guy’ when playing games – I can’t even be mean to my villagers on Animal Crossing, I just feel too bad about it!

I have a 10-month old black cat called Jasper who is leash trained and comes out for walks with us. He loves being outside, and I love getting to visit places and take him with us. Last summer, we took him camping for 10 days in Assynt (that’s on the west coast of Scotland), and to the Isle of Mull (and island off the west coast) and he loved it.

One of my favourite things to do is take photos of birds and other wildlife. I find it so relaxing and thrilling when you get the photo you were hoping to take. I love all birds, but my favourite bird at the minute is a sanderling. They are small white shore birds with black legs and a black beak. Sanderlings run around amongst the waves on the shore as they search for food.

I love learning different things, so my path to doing my PhD was not a straight one. When I first went to university I still didn’t really know what career I wanted. I chose an undergraduate degree in forensic science because it covered a range of subject areas (I learned about DNA, decomposition, insects, paint analysis, and got to practice processing a crime scene). I dropped out after 1.5 years because I still didn’t feel sure about what I wanted to do, and started working in marketing because I loved writing. In my spare time, I was also a freelance Formula One journalist (which was a lot of fun) and got to travel to grand prix as a member of the media! After a few years, I was struggling to become a full-time journalist and realised marketing was not right for me and that I really missed science. So, I went back to university to finish my degree in forensic science. Before the start of my third year I visited Canada and saw a bear (my favourite animal) for the first time, which was incredible. I saw a lot of people standing really close to the bear, which seemed worrying because why would you get really close to a bear?! After that, I started to learn about human-wildlife conflict and became hooked. When I finished my undergraduate degree I moved to Edinburgh to do a masters degree in Environmental Protection and Management. I then saw and applied for the PhD I’m currently doing, and moved to Aberdeen.

My research is desk-based which means I do not do laboratory work or field work (this is where you might travel to a particular location to carry out a study). Instead, I use data collected from social media and analyse it using a programming language called R. Some of the questions I can ask include:

• What words are commonly used when people post on social media about nature?
• What kind of things are people talking about when they post about nature? (i.e fishing, birdwatching, specific locations, trees, etc).
• Are people talking about their experience in a positive, neutral, or negative way?

I also use online surveys in my research to understand how social media may influence a person’s expectations of a nature experience. For example, if you see a photo or a video on social media of another person stood 5 metres away from a bear, do you then want to stand 5 metres away from a bear? Do you think it is safe to stand 5 metres away from a bear? This is a complicated question to ask, but it’s very important because bad behaviour around wildlife (such as getting too close to a wild animal or feeding a wild animal) can be dangerous for both people and wildlife.