Emma took a non-standard route into higher education having left school at 16 years old and is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biology at the University of York. She is an ardent champion for statistical programming and reproducibility in data practices.
Emma enjoys teaching a wide range of people from undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, to higher education teaching and research professionals and scientific officers. One thing individuals of this diverse group often have in common is a lack of confidence in their ability to become coders. Emma’s philosophy is that anyone can learn to analyse and present their data reproducibly and that learning to do so can be fun.
Emma uses a range of technology-mediated learning tools such as audience response systems and has an enthusiasm for her subject which is infectious. She is a two-time winner of the University of York Students’ Union (YUSU) Teacher of the Year Excellence Award (2016 and 2018) and received the Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award in 2020.
Emma also works to increase the representation of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of colour and people with disabilities in the coding community and is on the Core Team of RForwards, the R foundation’s taskforce on women and underrepresented groups. As a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, a member of the Biochemical Society’s Training Panel and a Royal Society of Biology trainer, she is passionate about developing the bioscience community’s capacity in reproducible and sustainable data practices to enable world-class research. She was an invited tutorial speaker at the international useR! conference in Toulouse in 2019.