Profile

Originally from South Africa, I moved around a lot with my parents and 4 older sisters. In my twenties, I decided to settle in England (we’d lived here before) and that’s when I started my Master’s and PhD in psychology. I’ve been here for 5 and a half years, and now own a house, with my boyfriend, just outside of London.

I’m a huge fan of RPG games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim and the Witcher, and love reading fantasy and sci fi novels. Outside of my PhD-related work, that’s mostly what I do for fun!

I work as both a Research Scientist for a cyber security company, and am doing my PhD in psychology. The psychology side of things is why I’m here, so I’ll give more detail on that.

My thesis is exploring various different deception techniques used by psychopaths to see if there’s a difference between how male and female psychopaths behave when they’re conning others. Part of this includes looking at charm, and how acting like a typical femme fatale may work for some psychopathic women, as well as how this type of charm appeals to men.

Hopefully, with the research I’m doing, we’ll be able to understand female psychopaths better. This means we can identify them, offer them treatment if they’re looking for it, and help others who have been negatively affected by them.

Specifically, in my research role, there’s  a broader timeline across many months, instead of just within one day. Think of it like an essay you need to write, but you have months (or years) to write it. That means I have a lot of time on my hands, but it also means I have all that time to make it as good as I can.

So one day could look like this:

I go over the data from a study I’m conducting – maybe it’s an online survey, maybe it’s a Zoom interview with someone – and analyse it to see if there are any patterns and what this tells me about the topic I’m investigating. Sometimes this involves colour-coding and interpreting what’s been said by someone, and sometimes this involves complicated statistics analysis of the data (it’s actually quite fun once you get the hang of it). This type of day is usually my favourite, because it’s like putting together one giant puzzle, only I don’t know what the picture will be. I also feel like Sherlock Holmes sometimes, and that makes me feel pretty cool.

Another day may be like this:

I read lots of research papers written by other talented scientists who have covered work that is similar to mine. By reading what they’ve done, I can learn about their findings, see what will help me with my experiments, and see what their mistakes were, to make sure I don’t make the same ones with my research (working in research is like being part of a big family, where past studies and experiments are there to help you, much like a family would). I’ll make notes (while listening to music) and gather my notes together to write up in an essay-like format what I’ve found and what this means to the subject I’m studying. This often helps me come up with plans for future studies, too, so I know what I can look into next.

My work day will eventually involve going to conferences, and attending meetings with like-minded individuals, but because of COVID, I haven’t been able to do those things just yet.