My research is in applied probability.  In many real-life situations probability distributions of interest are tricky to handle, but can be well approximated by distributions which are much easier to work with (such as a Gaussian or Poisson distribution).  Much of my work has been in the theory and application of Stein's method, which allows the quality of such probability approximations to be explicitly evaluated in a wide variety of settings without relying on assumptions of independence.  Stein's method also has several links with information theory which have provided a fruitful area of research.

I completed a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Nottingham in 2008.  I then spent around 18 months at the University of Zurich and three years at the University of Bristol.  I took up a lectureship at Heriot-Watt in August 2013.