I come from a big ol' Irish family. My home is small village called Kilcar in rural Donegal, but I lived much of my early life on the sunny south coast of England. I moved away at 18 to go to university, and have been moderately nomadic ever since.
When I'm not in the lab or in the field I am usually swimming. As I am a cisgender white woman in my thirties I think wild swimming is an acceptable substitute for a personality, and there is nothing that brings me more joy than throwing myself into a lake or the sea. If you would like to read more about my aquatic adventures I have a rarely updated swimming blog, or you can listen to me waffle on about mountains on my friend Ronni's podcast.
Alternatively you may find me at St. Mary's as, having had a season ticket from the age of 7, I for some reason remain a Southampton FC fan and I suspect it may be too late to change my allegiances.
My other interests include watching cricket, and listening to cricket, and badly playing cricket. During the COVID pandemic I got a shout out on TMS and it is still one of my favourite things to have ever happened.
Although I claim to only like sad indie music I'm actually fairly eclectic in my tastes - sometimes I even listen to happy indie music. You can get far too much information about my past, current and, eventually, future music taste by digging into my last.fm account.
As someone who studies climate change, it is impossible to be apolitical. My politics, however, are not exclusively environmental. First and foremost, I am a socialist, and believe the ongoing climate crisis is a product of our fundamentally flawed economic system which continuously places profit before people and planet. If you would like to argue with me you can find me on bluesky, or if you just want to shout into the void you can tell me off on the website formerly known as twitter.
I made this website from scratch using skills I developed as a teenager messing around on myspace, and a lot of help from the Jekyll website.
The gifs on the homepage I made myself, using a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator alongside a good deal of stubborness. The graphics on the home page were created by ChatGPT, using prompts such as "generate image of a fountain pen and notepad in the style of a watercolour painting with the colour palette #654ea3 #eaafc8" as I have decided sometimes I don't need to break myself when a tool exists that can do it more efficiently. I do plan to carbon offset my AI usage annually, check my blog to see if I follow through on that.
If you would like to use this website as a template do feel free, the full code is available openly on my github repo. I would appreciate credit where credit is due, but I'm not in this game for clout so you can just steal.