Who I am
Hello! I'm a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh interested in ecological statistics, looking into biodiversity quantification. I'm fascinated by both statistics and ecology, so please reach out if you'd like to chat about either!
As well as being interested in the theory, I love to join volunteer conservation work whenever I can. I spend most of my weekends with the Lothians Conservation Volunteers, acting on the committee as Tools Officer and one of the task leaders.
When not working or volunteering, I'm keen for pretty much any outdoor activity, from rock climbing to ultramarathons and cycle touring to wild swimming.
Research
I have just begun my PhD research into the statistical issues associated with the quantification of biodiversity, co-funded by the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and NERC, through the E5 DTP.
My undergraduate project, supervised by David Sterratt and Vanda Inacio and inspired by Gelman et al (2007), looked at developing a Bayesian hierarchical model to investigate ethnic bias in police stop and search in England and Wales. In 2025, I presented this work to the Royal Statistical Society's Edinburgh local group as well as in the Instutute for Adaptive and Neural Computation's seminar series at the University of Edinburgh.
I spent the summer of 2024 working at McGill University, Montreal, within the Pulse Breeding and Genetics Research Laboratory, supervised by Professor Valerio Hoyos-Villegas and fully funded by MITACS
. We investigated and benchmarked the use of
ensemble methods (including ensemble deep learning) for genomic prediction in common bean across several sites in North America.
Our paper Environment ensemble models for genomic prediction in common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)
is now published in
The Plant Genome.
Teaching
Foundations of Data Science, The University of Edinburgh
I have been running drop-in labs of up to 50 students for this course since 2023 covering data manipulation, visualisation and basic statistial and machine learning techniques in python. I developed some new material for the 2025/26 run of the course.
Introductory Statistics Workshop, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh
In 2025, I developed and delivered a three-hour workshop introducing students on the Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants MSc to some basic data analysis, including hypothesis testing and regression, whilst covering key statistical theory.
Discrete Mathematics and Probability, The University of Edinburgh
I tutored two classes of up to 30 students for this course in both 2023 and 2024. Topics included proofs and basic probability theory.
Cognitive Science, The University of Edinburgh
I led drop-in labs of up to 30 students for this course in both 2024 and 2025.
CV
You can find my CV here.
Links to my online profiles: Linked In, Google Scholar.