ABOUT ME
I was born in Canada and grew up in Canada and Greece. I have travelled and lived around the world for study, work, and pleasure.
I am a scientist. I study health and risk behaviours as embodied responses shaped by biology, psychology, and social structure. Much of my work has focussed on testing, synthesising, and refining theoretical frameworks. I work with theory seriously because weak theory produces weak interventions, and weak interventions misdirect resources and policy. Evidence synthesis is central to my research identity. I am drawn to the uncomfortable work of integration: interrogating heterogeneity, exposing inconsistencies, and naming uncertainty. I do not believe that more studies produce better knowledge; I believe better reasoning about existing evidence is more urgent. I am committed to research quality and transparency. My work therefore includes the development of tools to appraise study quality, reduce bias, and make psychological evidence more honest about its limits. Methodological rigor is not just procedural compliance but an ethical stance.
I am sceptical of blanket recommendations and one-size-fits-all guidelines, particularly when they persist despite weak or outdated evidence. I advocate for personalized approaches to health that respect individual variability and lived experience. I also believe research must travel beyond academia, into dialogue with practitioners, clinicians, policymakers, and communities because complex problems demand multiple ways of knowing.
I am an educator. I educate to provoke movement; emotional, cognitive, existential movement. If learning does not unsettle, stir grief, ignite anger, or demand courage, then it is decorative. I help my students stand inside their own minds with honesty and strength. I trust emotion as data, doubt as intelligence, and the ability to change one’s mind when new data emerge. I educate from presence, not citation; from lived coherence, not borrowed authority. I remember my students because I meet them where transformation happens. And I allow myself to be changed too because teaching that does not change the teacher is dead.
My formal academic journey began in Greece, where I completed a BA in Psychology at Deree College and a BSc in Psychology at Panteion University, grounding me early in both international and Greek academic traditions. I then went to the UK, completing an MSc in Organizational Psychology at the University of Manchester, where my interest in behaviour, power, and structure began to crystallise beyond the individual level. I completed my PhD in Health Psychology at the University of Bath, where my work consolidated a theoretically rigorous, methodologically demanding, and impact-oriented research identity that continues to shape how I think, teach, and do science. After that...academia propelled me to the World.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Nelson Mandela
