Who am I?

I am originally from a small town in North East Germany located between Berlin and the Baltic Sea. I came to the UK to complete my school education in a Sixth Form College in the North of Cambridge and then spent eight years studying at Anglia Ruskin University, completing a BSc (Hons) Psychology, an MSc in Clinical Child Psychology, and a PhD in Brain and Cognition research. I moved to London in the fall of 2016 and have been an educator at various universities since then. In 2021, I started a Diploma in Gestalt Psychotherapy at the Metanoia Institute.

I am immensely passionate about education, equality and diversity, and mental health and this informs how I operate in the world.

Publications

As everyone who holds a PhD, I have received extensive training in a specialised area of research and broadly identify as a cognitive scientist/psycholinguist. You can find a list of my publications on Google Scholar.

Verbal and non-verbal cognition

My doctoral research explored whether and how speaking more than one language (bi-/multilingualism) may impact verbal and non-verbal cognition, such as probabilistic learning, metacognition, the impact of trait anxiety on inhibition, and sentence comprehension in the presence of noise. I continue to be interested in this phenomenon, however, most of my research now focuses on verbal cognition, specifically deception proficiency.

Relational aspects in contemporary Gestalt psychotherapy

I have completed my first year of a UKCP-accredited Gestalt psychotherapy training and am now seeing clients in a low-cost counselling service as a trainee therapist. I am also engaging in my own personal therapy. Gestalt is a relational humanistic form of therapy placing the relationship between therapist and client right at the centre of the work. However, to date, there is a dearth of research exploring some of the dialogic relationship and how it may be impacted (or not) by outside factors (wider ‘field conditions’). My lab is currently conducting a study evaluating how working online may impact the dialogic relationship between therapist and client and we will also soon be launching a project evaluating the experiences of trainee therapists going to personal therapy.