Projects

BESPPOKE

I am Principal Investigator on the BESPPOKE (Building on Established Stakeholder Partnerships for Pregnancy loss communication to Optimise Knowledge Exchange, 2025-2026) Project. Funded by Research England's Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), this project aims to build on the earlier EStELC (AHRC IAA 2023-2024; see below) and SuPPL (QR-PSF 2023-2024; see below) projects to expand the Knowledge Exchange network invested in addressing pregnancy loss communication challenges. This project's partner organisations are the charities Tommy’s, Sands, Petals, and The Miscarriage Association. 

RECENTRE

I am Co-Investigator on the RECENTRE (Understanding Epidemics in Pregnant and Lactating People and Infants: an Interdisciplinary Network, 2025-2027), Project, which is funded by a personal Wellcome Trust award to Dr Shema Tariq. RECENTRE aims to understand and address (re)emerging infections in pregnant/lactating people and infants. The project partners are Penta (a global scientific network at the forefront of infections in children, and Tommy’s (the UK’s leading charity funding research into pregnancy, baby loss and preterm birth). 

VERDIQual

I am a Co-Investigator on the VERDIQual Project, funded by the European Commission. This is using qualitative and mixed-methods investigation of mpox in endemic and non-endemic areas. I am leading the Corpus Linguistic analysis, working alongside the VERDIQual team at UCL, Dr Shema Tariq, Dr Marthe Le Prevost, and Dr Emily Jay Nicholls and the project's international collaborators in Nigeria, Italy, and Thailand.

EStELC

I was Principal Investigator on EStELC (Engaging Stakeholders to Explore Linguistic Challenges in Communicating about Pregnancy Loss, 2023-2024). Funded by AHRC and in partnership with the charities Tommy’s and Sands, this project conducted qualitative research to explore the impact of language on experiences of receiving and delivering care during and after pregnancy loss. The Research Assistant on this project was Dr Eloise Parr. EStELC findings can be found here. 

Prescriptivism in Action

I completed my AHRC-funded PhD thesis, Prescriptivism in Action, part-time between 2013 and 2021. During this time I also worked full-time on the SAMUELS Project (see below) for 15 months, and held visiting lectureships at the University of Manchester and Liverpool Hope University. I also lived abroad for two years and had three periods of maternity leave! My PhD thesis asks why we have such difficulty in tracking the effects of language rules, and how new computational methods can address this seemingly intractable problem. 

STEPS

I am Principal Investigator on the STEPS (Supporting a Transition to Evidence-based Policy language: Sensitivity in pregnancy loss policy) Project (2024-2025). Funded by a UCL Quality Related Policy Support Fund (QR-PSF) award and a Lord Quirk Endowment grant, this project will expand the pool of policy makers and influencers engaged in discussing the importance of evidence-based pregnancy loss communication and extend existing policy-enabling research and data collection for this purpose. By leveraging the expertise, findings, and established networks of the EStELC (AHRC IAA 2023-2024; see below) and SuPPL (QR-PSF 2023-2024; see below) projects, it will continue supporting policy makers’ transition to evidence-based, minimally harmful, pregnancy loss language.

COMMET

I am Co-Investigator on the COMMET (CO-produced Mathematical Modelling of Epidemics Together, 2025-2027) Project, which is funded by a UKRI Interdisciplinary fund to tackle epidemic threats. Dr Liz Fearon (UCL Institute for Global Health) is leading a project that seeks to improve the integration of public voices into epidemic response modelling. Receiving close to £960,000 from the UKRI, the project brings together epidemiology, mathematics, social sciences, human-computer interaction and corpus linguistics with research co-production expertise. Other co-leads include Dr Shema Tariq and Dr Emily Jay Nicholls (both UCL Institute for Global Health), Niccola Hutchinson-Pascal (UCL Culture, Co-production Collective), and colleagues at the University of Manchester.

SuPPL

I was Principal Investigator on SuPPL (Supporting Policymakers to Negotiate Communicative Challenges around Pregnancy Loss, 2023-2024). Funded by Research England, and also in partnership with Tommy’s and Sands, this project used an online questionnaire to assess the impact of language on experiences of pregnancy loss more broadly, and create evidence-based guidelines for pregnancy loss language in policy documents. SuPPL findings and recommendations can be found here. 

Introducing Linguistics

Introducing Linguistics is a textbook for undergraduates and postgraduates, published by Routledge in 2022. It was edited by a team of linguists based at the renowned Linguistics and English Language Department at Lancaster University, led by Professor Jonathan Culpeper. I was Managing Editor and was responsible for day-to-day running of the project. As a keen amateur artist, I was also responsible for most of the artwork, including the colourful cover art.

SAMUELS Project

The SAMUELS Project was an ESRC/AHRC consortium project led by the University of Glasgow, with Lancaster University, the University of Huddersfield, the University of Central Lancashire, the University of Strathclyde, and Oxford University Press. Its purpose was to produce semantically-annotated versions of two major text corpora, the Semantic Hansard Corpus and the Semantic EEBO (Early English Books Online) corpus. I was a Research Assistant working with Professor Dawn Archer at the University of Central Lancashire.