I am a social scientist, specialising in large scale language analysis. While my work is primarily in the security sector, with particular reference to forensic linguistics, I maintain an interest in a broad range of language analysis topics.

I am currently a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, working on a project within the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) relating to disclosure behaviour. Recently, I worked on the EC funded Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism (BRaVE) project, building a toolkit to measure forms of polarisation and resilience across the EU. Previously, I have worked on a range of language analysis projects, particularly in the area of security, including Native Language Influence Detection, Exploring Discursive Representations of EU Maritime Security, Time, Response and Audience Construed Evaluation of Extreme and Counter-Messages, and Understanding the Language of Extremism and its Potential for Predicting Risk. I continue to publish and undertake consultancy work in this area. In addition to work in the field of security, I have also undertaken language analysis research on present and historical English and Scottish relations, as well as development work on UCREL's automated semantic tagger and corpus approaches to biomedical text analysis.