Profile

I am both Scottish and French, and grew up in France before moving to Scotland to come to university (5 years ago). I used to ski in France but couldn’t keep it up in the UK, now I do martial arts on and off!

South of France (where I’m from).

I live in Edinburgh with my boyfriend and another flatmate. We don’t have any pets but would love to adopt a cat! I am currently in my first year of my PhD and still settling in!

Edinburgh Castle and rooftops

I’ve recently gone vegetarian and miss burgers and bbq pizzas the most… I’m currently watching the new Doctor Who, Sherlock (I’ve only just started!) and The Good Place (no spoilers please I haven’t seen the new season!). I’m also a big fan of Marvel movies and comics.

For my PhD research, I am looking at how moving to secondary school affect autistic children’s mental health (things like their mood, feelings, behaviour).

Going to a new school and becoming a teenager is already difficult for children without autism (you might have had a hard time moving to high school, and that’s normal!) but for autistic children this can be even harder as they can struggle with new environments, making new friends or bullying for example. I’m looking at how this can increase nervousness (or anxiety) and decrease mood for these children, and this will hopefully help us find a way to make the move to high school less stressful for them!

I’m also helping out with a study on how we can better measure depression using information gathered by our phones (like how much you speak to your friends through calls and text messages, or how many apps you use and for how long). We hope this will help us measure and treat depression better, and hopefully help people who are struggling with depression better.

In my role as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, I am assisting a professor at Heriot-Watt with the teaching of statistics and research methods to first year undergraduate Psychology students. This means we go in a computer lab and they work through some instructions on how to run analyses on data from psychological experiments. I’m here to teach them how to do it and to answer any questions they have.

My typical day starts at 7.30 when I get up to go to uni.

I’ll have breakfast then get ready, then walk 15 minutes to catch a bus to the university. I’m usually in my office by 9.30.

I usually spend my morning checking what I have to do for the day, then reading some scientific papers (I’m always reading!) and taking notes on them. This helps me know why what I read is important and how it helps my research.

Some days I also tutor undergraduate classes (Statistics at the moment) so I spend 1 to 2 hours in the lab or in a tutorial class.

I also spend some time during the day browsing Twitter to check academic news (yes scientists are on Twitter!) and look for new conference or training opportunities. As I am still learning to do research, I spend a lot of my time looking for new training to learn new things about research and science!

Depending on which stage of the research process I’m at, I will also be doing things like recruiting participants for my study, run the study and meet people so they can participate in my study, and do statistical analyses on the data I collect during my study. I might also be writing up the results in a report!

There are 3 other PhD students in my office so I also spend my day chatting to them now and then.