After completing my PhD in Second Language Education from McGill University, Canada (2011), I moved to Bristol University as Lecturer then Senior Lecturer in Education and Founding Director of the EU-funded Second Language Speech Lab. I was appointed Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at UCL in 2016 and have served as Programme Leader for the MA TESOL In-Service and TESOL Pre-Service programmes. I am also Associate Professor in TESOL at Anaheim University, US. 

I am current Co-Editor of the high impact journal, Language Testing. I served as an expert member of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment and am a current member of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners (ETS), advising on research and development. In 2022, I led a test validation projects on the predictive validity of Duolingo, examining test scores in relation to academic attainment and am currently researching the linguistic quality of test-takers' performances on the two-way IELTS discussion task.

Alongside this work, I research health communication. I co-led the Communication theme for the MRC-NIHR Trials Methodology Research Partnership (TMRP) Trial Conduct Working Group, investigating methods for improving communication across all phases of a clinical trial. My research interests in this area include improving the recruitment and retention of under-served groups, particularly ethnic minorities, and generating evidence-based best practice recommendations for making information more accessible to stakeholders. I am leading a small-scale MRC-NIHR TMRP project examining how language-related patient eligibility decisions are made during recruitment to clinical trials. A corpus of informed consent documents used in cancer trials that arose from my pump-priming project is available open access through UK Data Service. I am also interested in doctor-patient communication and analysed senior hospital doctors' simulated consultations in partnership with a London-based National Health Service (NHS) Trust. More recently, I collaborated on an ESRC-funded emergency COVID project working with community organisations to improve vaccine uptake in ethnic minorities. 

Within the educational arena, I am interested in assessment in both classroom and high-stakes settings. I am an expert member of the OECD's PISA 2025 foreign language assessment, advising on assessment design and questionnaire development. I served as a reviewer of revised phonology descriptors for the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). I am also interested in technology-mediated assessment, including automated speech recognition, automated scoring, machine translation, and communication applications of artificial intelligence. I would welcome collaborations in these areas.