I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Developmental Psychopathology, Director of the MSc in Applied Developmental Psychology, and the Director of the InteRRaCt Lab at Queen’s University Belfast. I have served previously as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor at London Metropolitan University, London, UK and Tomsk State University, Russia, respectively. I am an Associate Editor for the Journal Personality and Individual Differences and the Journal Acta Psychologica (Individual Differences Section); and a member of the Editorial Board in Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and Frontiers in Psychology. I participate actively in dissemination of scientific findings in both academic audiences and the public with my research on narcissism to be the subject of frequent media coverage from the world’s largest international broadcasters (e.g., BBC World Service, CNN, Times and Forbes) resulting so far in more than 1,000 pieces of coverage worldwide. In January 2022, I was invited to become a Member and an Advocate of the European Association for Personality Psychology (EAPP) for the UK and Ireland.

My current research interests involve exploring the degree to which dark personalities (with a particular focus on narcissism) contribute to resilience and performance across contexts. My work has focused on narcissism, as a first step, in order to highlight some positive sides of this seemingly dark trait, such as showing resilience. The objective of my research programme is not to rehabilitate dark personalities, but rather to contextualize them in a complex web of societal costs and benefits. In so doing, I plan, through collaborative work, to be able to look into ways in which society can harness the energy of dark personalities while also curtailing their potential for harm.

I am a Teaching and Learning Focussed Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Queen's University Belfast where I am the Director of Undergraduate Education. I specialise in the areas of Individual Differences, Quantitative Methods and Psychometrics. I am a Chartered Psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

In addition to my involvement with ISSID, I’m an active member of the British Psychological Society Undergraduate Education Committee which is responsible for the accreditation of Psychology degree programmes in the UK. In 2019 I was elected to the executive committee of the European Society for Psychology Learning and Teaching (ESPLAT).

My research interests include intelligence, personality, metacognition and how these factors are related to educational attainment. In addition to collaborating with Kostas’s InteRRaCt lab, I am currently running a project to encourage student’s self-development using insight into their own personality traits. My pedagogical research interests including the use of student response systems in large classes and using meaningful authentic assessments to improve student engagement with education.