With a disciplinary background in law and criminology, Jane has worked in higher education for over 20 years as a teacher, researcher and academic leader. Her expertise is in doctoral education, particularly professional doctorates and the mental health and wellbeing of postgraduate research students (PGRs).
Working in partnership with students, she is committed to creating supportive and inclusive learning environments in which all doctoral researchers can achieve their full potential. She has designed, developed and delivered highly successful professional doctorate programmes in criminal justice and education and also teaches on institution-wide development programmes for postgraduate research students and their supervisors. Jane is leading an Office for Students funded project on the health and wellbeing of postgraduate research students, and as the institutional Postgraduate Research Wellbeing Champion, she implements and monitors a strategy she developed for promoting wellbeing.
A hallmark of her professional practice is engaging students as partners and she is working with students in enhancing supervisor training, developing targeted online resource and enhancing personal and professional skills through peer action learning sets.
Jane co-organised the First International Conference on Postgraduate Mental Health and Wellbeing in Brighton in May 2019 and has been a member of the Vitae Concordat Writing Group drafting the revised UK Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers.
She has presented numerous papers at national and international conferences on doctoral policy, practice and pedagogy; curriculum design; postgraduate research student progression and completion; defining and assessing “doctorateness”, the impact of professional doctorates in the workplace and postgraduate research mental health and wellbeing. Her other specialist interests are in academic writing and leadership in higher education and she has published and presented widely in these areas.
She is a Principal Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research at the University of Sussex, and a trustee and member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Higher Education.