In my research, I investigate language and the brain, broadly speaking. With a background in linguistics and philosophy, my default is to reduce complex systems into tangible parts by working from first principles. As a highly application-oriented thinker, my aim is always to build something (a finding, a tool, a resource) that has real-world impact. 

Currently, I have four areas of activity research. My PhD research takes gestures, and asks whether we can use them to improve language testing with direct electrical stimulation (during awake brain surgeries). I won internal funding to collect the world's largest database of gestures made during everyday conversation, which has spun out discoveries about gestures' syntax, their interactive nature, and their co-occurrence with speech errors. 

In a collaboration with colleagues in Germany, I am also leading a project that won British Council funding to systematically review and construct a database of neurostimulation evidence of specific linguistic processes being modulated. This not only enables bottom-up modelling of the neurobiology of language but may create a tool for awake craniotomy planning.

In my role at the University of Southern California, we investigate the influence of embodied semantics on metaphor processing in impaired populations. Our first project involved evaluating the processing of colour-blind people for metaphors involving colour, compared with colour-seeing people, ChatGPT, and painters. Our next study involves the processing of sound-related metaphors in d/Deaf people.

In 2023-24, collaborators and I won grant funding at Oxford University to combine psycholinguistics and syntax in a study about whether speaking a "pro-drop" language influences recognition memory ability.

During my MPhil at Cambridge University, I studied the psycholinguistics of idioms from the perspective of embodied semantics, asking whether idioms with action-related meanings are processed quicker/more accurately.