I gained my doctorate in history from Kingston University in 2007, studying nursing in Victorian London, looking particularly at nursing as a form of paid employment for women at a time when more women were looking to enter the labour market. Over the last 7 years I have been involved in the HHARP project on Victorian children's hospitals, building databases of admissions to four such hospitals and making them publicly available via a dedicated website, www.hharp.org. The project has built databases of admissions (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to three children's hospitals in London and one in Glasgow. I have now embarked on writing a series of articles which will be based on findings from these databases, comparing the incidence of disease admissions and geographic origin of the patients among other fields of interest. I have recently completed work on a three year AHRC-funded project, Museum Lives, jointly run by the Natural History Museum and Kingston University's School of Humanities. I was the main oral historian on the project which collected the stories of 50 long-serving or retired members of staff. I am planning several articles derived from the outputs from the project. My research interests include the development of nursing as a scientific profession; women's changing role in English society, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the development of health care provision. As a member of the History Department’s Centre for the Historical Record, I am also very interested in the development of links between archives and academic historians for the benefit for both, and in bridging the divide between academic and public history.

I teach on first year Historians' Craft, third year Women in Britain and America, and at Masters level on the Archives and History module. I am module leader for the second year module: History Extended Essay; and at Masters level for Digital Historian. I also supervise dissertation students at both 3rd year and Masters level.

I am supervising one PhD student on the development of the cottage hospital movement in England.

I am a member of the Steering Committees for the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery at Manchester Uiveristy and the Women's History Network. I also sit on the editorial committee for the Women's History Magazine.