As a child, I dreamed of becoming a professional cake decorator. However, it soon became clear that my future was more likely to lie in mathematics than baking: when planning the cake I wanted for my twelfth birthday, I announced proudly to my family that the design I had come up with would require exactly fourteen twenty-fifths of an egg.

I went on to obtain an MMath in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 2009; I stayed in Oxford, working under the supervision of Alex Scott, to complete my DPhil in Mathematics (with a thesis entitled Graph Colourings and Games) in 2013. From 2012 to 2014, I was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, working with Mark Jerrum on the EPSRC-funded project Computational Counting.

I came to the University of Glasgow in 2014, where I held a lectureship in the School of Mathematics and Statistics for two years. In October 2016 I moved to the School of Computing Science, where I currently hold a five-year Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship (funded by the Scottish Government).