Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Lecturer
- Cell & Developmental Biology
- Div of Biosciences
- Faculty of Life Sciences
I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago where I completed BSc degrees in Biological Sciences and Earth and Environmental Sciences, supervised by Roy Plotnick. In 2004, I received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship allowing me to pursue my PhD in Earth Sciences under the supervision of David Norman and Emily Rayfield. I used anatomy, biomechanical modelling, and tooth wear to understand feeding mechanism and diet in the earliest dinosaurs. From 2008 - 2012, I conducted research and taught human anatomy at the University of Chicago, working with Callum Ross to understand feeding in lizards and crocodilians using in vivo experiments and finite element modelling. I returned to the UK as Marie Curie Fellow, working at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge with Jennifer Clack to model function in the tetrapod lower jaw across the water-land transition. I then worked for three years with Chris Richards at the Royal Veterinary College looking at the evolution of locomotion in frogs before briefly returning to Bristol as a Senior Research Associate. I joined UCL and the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology as a lecturer in anatomy in 2018.




My research explores the link between animal form, function and large-scale evolutionary events, such as environmental changes, mass extinctions, and adaptive radiations. I use a combination of techniques, including medical imaging, 3D visualization, and biomechanical modelling methods such as finite element and musculoskeletal modelling.
Additionally, I collect data from living animals, including high-speed and X-ray video, bite and footfall forces, and biological material properties. I work across a range of vertebrate taxa, and my work encompasses both living and fossil animals. In recent years, my work has been funded by NERC, the European Commission and Wellcome.
I am lecturer for the UCL Medical School, primarily for the second year Movement and Musculoskeletal Biology module. I teach in additional anatomy courses within the Faculty of Life Sciences and Biomedical Sciences, such as ANAT0001 and ANAT0004.
SEP-2018 | Lecturer | Cell and Developmental Biology | University College London, United Kingdom |
OCT-2017 – AUG-2018 | Senior Research Associate | School of Earth Sciences | University of Bristol, United Kingdom |
OCT-2014 – SEP-2017 | Postdoctoral Researcher | Structure and Motion Laboratory | Royal Veterinary College, United Kingdom |
OCT-2012 – SEP-2014 | Marie Curie Fellow | School of Earth Sciences | University of Bristol, United Kingdom |
AUG-2008 – SEP-2012 | Postdoctoral Scholar | Organismal Biology and Anatomy | University of Chicago, United States |
2019 | ATQ03 - Recognised by the HEA as a Fellow | ||
2010 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Cambridge | |
2004 | Bachelor of Science | University of Illinois at Chicago |