Team
Meet the team
Prof Lauren
Hall-Lew
Professor Lauren Hall-Lew is a sociolinguist, studying the relationship between language and society. Lauren is from the United States and has been living in Edinburgh since 2010.
Dr Beatrice
Alex
Dr Beatrice Alex is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Turing Fellow and her research is on text mining for data in different domains. She leads the Edinburgh Language Technology Group and the Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group.
Dr Claire
Cowie
Dr Claire Cowie is a sociolinguist working on globalisation. Her research is concerned with the expression of identity in international settings, such as call centres or international schools and universities. Originally from South Africa, she has been living in Edinburgh since 2005.
Dr Catherine
Lai
Dr Catherine Lai is a linguist and computer scientist, specializing in spoken language understanding, affective computing, and multimodal speech processing. Starting off from Tasmania, Australia, she finally seems to have stopped moving north!
Dr Shan-Jan Sarah
Liu
Dr Shan-Jan Sarah Liu is a political scientist, studying gender and politics across the globe, with a special focus on Asia. Sarah had lived in the United States most of her life before moving to Edinburgh in 2019.
Dr Clare
Llewellyn
Dr Clare Llewellyn is a Career Development Fellow in the Neuropolitics Lab which is based in the School of Political and Social Science. She specializes in text analytics and natural language processing. She is originally from Liverpool and has come to Edinburgh via Cardiff, London, Princeton and Ann Arbor.
Dr Zuzana
Elliott
Dr Zuzana Elliott is a researcher interested in sociolinguistics of migration and globalisation, with a special focus on urban adult speech, second language acquisition, language attitudes, and identities regarding varieties of English. She is originally from Slovakia and has been living in Scotland since 2013.
Nina Markl
Nina Markl is a PhD student in sociolinguistics and natural language processing. Originally from Innsbruck, Austria she has been calling Edinburgh home since 2015.
Stephen Joseph
McNulty
Stephen Joseph McNulty is a 2nd year PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh. His project focuses specifically on investigating language policy and ideologies in the Catalan-speaking region of France. He is originally from Motherwell, but has studied in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and lived in the latter now for around three years.
Dr Anita
Klingler
Anita Klingler has just completed her PhD in History at Edinburgh University, working on public discourses on political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She perviously studied English Language and History, also at Edinburgh, and is interested in the potential for combining her research interests across both disciplines in the future
Dr Karri Gillespie-Smith
Dr Karri Gillespie-Smith is a Developmental Psychologist interested in linking core social and cognitive constructs to real world applications and mental health outcomes in both neurotypical and neurodiverse groups (i.e. autism, intellectual disabilities, adverse childhood experiences). She joined the Clinical Psychology department at the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in 2019 and has experience using a wide range of experimental methods including eye-tracking, behavioural tasks, neuropsychological batteries and surveys. She joined the amazing Lothian Diary project team in 2020.
Dr Rachel Happer
Dr Rachel Happer is a Clinical Psychologist based in the School of Health in Social Science and is the Director of the University of Edinburgh Centre for Psychological Therapies. Rachel has spent twenty years in clinical practice, specialising in trauma. As former Head of the Scotland’s National Confidential Forum she witnessed the power of people placing their personal accounts of institutional abuse on national record. Her research and clinical interests focus on trauma, institutional dynamics, and compassion-based approaches. Rachel loves the restaurants in her home town of Liverpool and the scenery in her adopted home of Edinburgh.
Verity S R Smith
Verity is a Freelance Curator, Consultant and Writer, working across the fields of collections, exhibitions, community engagement, volunteer management and governance, and is an Associate Consultant for Sporting Heritage. Verity has worked within a variety of institutions including local authorities, national museums, and higher education establishments.
Originally from Lincolnshire, Verity studied in both Liverpool and Leicester, and has called West Yorkshire home since 2012. She joined the Lothian Diary project team in 2022.