Our expertise

Teaching staff 

Several members of our staff are internationally recognised for their research, impact and teaching innovation. Students tell us that the opportunity to learn from and conduct research alongside knowledgeable staff with such wide-ranging expertise is a huge part of this course’s appeal. This is because our teaching team is drawn from the School of Psychology and the School of Life Sciences (Neuroscience).

Most of the psychology staff are members of the Cognition, Brain and Behaviour Research Group,which focuses on core themes such as perception, attention and memory, incorporating various behaviour measurement tools in their work, including eye tracking and EEG. We also study patients with neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

Staff in Life sciences, on the other hand, can support projects involving more molecular or cellular approaches to neuroscience. For example, their research involves studying long-term brain degeneration with ageing, how nervous system regenerates after injury, or the role of genetics in psychiatric conditions.

Teaching team:

• Dr Emma Smillie, Teaching Fellow (Psychology) – Emma is an experimental psychologist who joined Keele in 2022. Emma obtained her PhD at Liverpool Hope University. Her research interests are in visual search, face learning and unfamiliar face perception.
  
  
• Dr Chris Adams, Lecturer (Life sciences) – After obtaining his PhD in Cellular and Neural Engineering at Keele in 2015, Chris spent two years as a Research Fellow before becoming a Lecturer in Neuroscience. His research aims are to investigate a range of nanotechnology platforms which could improve effectiveness of neural cell transplantation therapies, whilst maintaining a high safety profile. He works within the Keele Neuroscience and Neurology Group.
  
  
• Dr Donna Berry, Teaching Fellow (Psychology) – Donna's main research interests centre around emotion processing, visual attention, and policing, with a particular focus on how these may differ amongst people on the autism spectrum. She joined Keele in 2012 having previously worked at the Open University and Northumbria University.
  
  
• Dr Joseph Brooks, Senior Lecturer (Psychology) – Joseph's research interests include visual perception and attention and the neural processes that give rise to them. His work focuses on perceptual organisation processes, such as figure-ground organisation and perceptual grouping, which play a role in determining the structure, shape, and depth that we perceive in visual scenes. An emerging strand of his work focuses on methods issues especially those related to safe and powerful EEG/ERP quantification.
  
  
• Professor Nicola Edelstyn, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology and Rehabilitation – Nicola was awarded her PhD in visual neurophysiology from Keele and went onto complete a series of postdoctoral fellowships at a number of universities before returning. Her current research includes aspects of memory in different clinical populations (anteromedial thalamic lesion patients, Parkinson’s, major depressive disorder). Nicola's current external roles include being President of the British Neuropsychological Society, of which she is also a former honorary secretary, and Associate Editor of European Neurology.
  
  
• Dr Stas Galzewski, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Stas worked in several scientific institutions in Poland and universities in the United States before moving to the UK. His research aims to understand how experience induces neuronal plasticity in the neocortex and how this plasticity is maintained. He is also interested in the mechanisms underlying simple forms of learning that may be induced in the barrel cortex with use of whiskers, synaptic changes driven by circadian rhythms and the consequences of demyelination.
  
  
• Dr Jim Grange, Senior Lecturer (Psychology) – Jim is an experimental cognitive psychologist, interested in cognitive control processes, the mechanisms that enable the human mind to control itself. He conducts fundamental research to understand cognitive control processes, and to then use this knowledge to tackle applied and clinical questions. He contributes to the editing of a number of academic journals: Frontiers in Cognitive Psychology; Nature's Scientific Reports; Collabra; and Frontiers in Cognitive Science.
  
  
• Dr Dmitry Kishkinev, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Born and raised in Russia, Dmitry joined Keele as a Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Behavioural Neuroscience in 2019. His current research focuses on three main themes: the sensory mechanisms of animal orientation and navigation; the neurosensory substrates and the proximate mechanisms of the animal’s magnetic sense; and the development and application of a versatile, affordable and scalable telemetry systems to monitor movement and activity of animals in the wild.
  
  
• Dr Ella Maysami, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Ella has experience in clinical research (prospective) and translational neuroscience (drug discovery). Her research interest lies in regeneration and repair, models of disease in neuroscience, neuroinflammation, companion diagnostic biomarkers, clinical/case studies, population health studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis.
  
  
• Dr Eunju Jenny Shin, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Eunju joined Keele as a Lecturer in Neuroscience in 2021. She previously worked at the world-renowned Wallenberg Neuroscience Center in Lund University, Sweden, where Professor Anders Björklund pioneered cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s disease. Her research utilises a wide range of techniques such as human pluripotent stem cell differentiation, CRISPR interference, single cell transcriptomics, proteomics, genetic analyses and various in vitro cellular assays.
  
  
• Dr Sara Spotorno, Lecturer (Psychology; School Director of MSc programmes) – Sara previously worked as a Clinical Psychologist and Neuropsychologist and as an Associate Teaching Fellow, before pursuing her academic path as a researcher. After several Postdoctoral Research Associate positions in France and the UK, she joined Keele in 2019. Her current research projects include: perceptual, cognitive and emotional factors in visual processing, attention and memory ; eye movements; and the functional specialisation of the cerebral hemispheres.
  
  
• Dr Richard Stephens, Senior Lecturer (Psychology) – Having been involved with Psychology for more than three decades, Richard has developed an international reputation for research on alcohol and emotional language. His research on the benefits of swearing for pain tolerance and for performing physical tasks is very well known and has been portrayed numerous times in the media. Sponsored by Nurofen, his most recent paper (2020) assessed whether we can mimic the beneficial effects of swearing on pain using newly invented swear words.
  
  
• Dr Chris Street, Senior lecturer (Psychology) – Chris joined Keele University in 2021, having worked previously at the University of Huddersfield and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His work sits at the intersection of human cognition and psychology and law to understand how people decide when and why to trust or distrust information. This has included working with national organisations to create evidence-based interventions to reduce susceptibility to phishing and smishing scams.
  
  
• Dr Simon Trent, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Simon has developed an extensive repertoire of research interests in behavioural and molecular neuroscience. He has published primary research and reviews in areas of hippocampal memory, genomics, and neuropharmacology. Current research explores how synaptic ‘risk genes’ contribute towards memory and psychiatric illness in people.
  
  
• Dr Helen Williams, Senior Lecturer (Psychology) – Helen joined Keele in 2013, having previously conducted postdoctoral research and teaching in North America. Her research interests are metacognitive awareness, recognition memory, the Remember-Know paradigm, and cognitive ageing and associated issues. This mostly deals with higher order cognitive processes, specifically the judgments people can make when learning information or retrieving material from memory.
  
  
• Dr Marta Woloszynowska-Fraser, Lecturer (Life Sciences) – Marta is interested in how interneurons in different brain regions contribute to neuronal firing and the excitation/inhibition balance. Her PhD focused on the behaviour of prefrontal interneurons in relation to schizophrenia. Prior to Keele, she spent time in the United States, working at the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience (LBN) and the Neurocognitive Aging Section of the National Institute on Aging, in Baltimore, USA, as well as teaching Biology at a local state university.