I completed my PhD (2006) at University College London before joining the Centre for Health Informatics at UNSW, Sydney (now at Macquarie University) for a two-year postdoc (2008 - 2010). I was an assistant professor in Hong Kong (2011 – 2020) before joining UWA.

I am a psychologist specialising in healthcare human factors. My research aims to improve effectiveness and safety of healthcare technology and work practices adopted by healthcare professionals (e.g. doctors and nurses). While I use theories and methods from cognitive psychology to investigate the basic science behind identified applied problems, I also carry out clinical simulation studies to validate findings from laboratory-based experiments.

I am looking for motivated and dedicated students to pursue a PhD in the following areas:

Auditory displays in healthcare -- are displays that use sounds to convey data information. The aim of this research is to provide an alternative to alarms when alerting clinicians to their patient’s deteriorating condition. One of the problems with alarms is that they are over abundant in hospitals; clinicians become desenitised to them (i.e. alarm fatigue) resulting in potential of missing real important ones. Effective alerting is especially important when clinicians are almost always engaged in multitasking activities.

Explainable AI (XAI) in healthcare -- XAI has recently become a research topic that investigates how AI-generated predictions and recommendations can be "explained" to users who have expert domain knowledge (e.g. doctors in medicine) but not necessarily knowledge in AI, machine learning, etc. There many important questions in the area, for example, how can XAI help clinicians make informed and safe decisions to ensure patient's safety? How can XAI improve clinicians' trust of AI technology in their workplace?

Existing programming skill is not a requirement. But my projects particularly suitable for students who are interested in learning basic programming to help with designing experiments for their PhD projects.

I am also happy to chat about other topics that fall under the broad area of healthcare human factors.