I joined the University of Aberdeen Business School as a Senior Lecturer in 2003 having previously held research posts at the University of Aberdeen’s Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research (1998-2003) and Health Services Research Unit (1994-1995), and the University of Edinburgh’s Research Unit in Health and Behavioural Change (1996-1998). I was promoted to Reader in 2007, and a Personal Chair in 2013. In 2013 I became an Associate Director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, a consortium centre based at the University of Edinburgh.

I hold an undergraduate degree in the natural sciences from the University of Cambridge (1989), in which I studied biology, history and philosophy of science, and specialised in experimental psychology. I moved into the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge for my PhD (1994). My thesis explored women's experiences of motherhood and postnatal depression and was funded by a Medical Research Council studentship. In 1994 I took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education funded by scholarships from the Fulbright Commission, the Wingate Foundation, and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.

I am currently working on a project called Digital Epiphanies which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This study explores societal aspects of the digital economy through an investigation of how digital devices and applications are incorporated and embedded in the fabric of everyday work and family life. The study examines the role these digital technologies play in reconfiguring the very nature of work, family, and the boundary between these. It highlights how these sociotechnical practices make possible new ways of working or being a family while eroding other work-family practices.