About

The question that runs through everything

My questions have always been about what happens to a person inside the situations they grow up in. Which conditions help a young person become themselves, and which conditions quietly arrange them into something else. That single question, phrased many different ways across the years, is what holds my work together.

The road here

I did not begin in psychology. I trained first in marketing, then in marketing analytics, and by 2016 I was working with multinational companies on AI and consumer analytics: systems that read behaviour at scale and act on what they read. The questions that held me were never the commercial ones. They were about what those systems were doing to the people inside them.

My PhD at the University of St Andrews, on Human Behaviour and Intelligent Systems, is where that question became my work. I spent four years on the psychological logic of systems that learn from people and respond to them: what they do well, where they erode the conditions they depend on, and what a developmental account of agency looks like when much of a young person’s environment is now algorithmic.

In 2019 I began working directly with children, teenagers, and young adults, and took a further degree in psychology at the University of Strathclyde to ground that work clinically. For the better part of a decade now I have worked with young people and their families, including families from Le Rosey, Harrow, Eton, and Institut auf dem Rosenberg. Watching a teenager come through a difficult season and grow into someone capable, steady, and generous is, plainly, the best part of the work.

The practice

Alongside the research and the writing, I work directly with families, and with the schools and institutions responsible for young people: private, developmental counsel, by referral. It takes seriously what the research keeps showing, that children become themselves through the steady, predictable presence of adults who know how to think about them, and it tries to build the conditions for that in a way that is workable for modern families. A&J Education, the coaching and educational programme I lead, grew from the same conviction; in 2024 it was recognised by King Charles III, which was both unexpected and a useful sign that the substance of the work travels.

Writing and research

Alongside the practice, I write: long essays, mostly, on what is happening to children’s interior lives now that those lives are also data. The journal on this site collects that writing. I publish peer-reviewed work in journals including Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, Surveillance & Society, Studies in Higher Education, and venues on human-computer interaction; the research page lists the full set. My first book, Coming of Age in the AI Era, is in progress.

Where I live, how I work

I split my time between London, Porto, and Geneva. The cities are different enough that they correct one another: London for the conversation, Porto for the longer view and the work itself, Geneva for the families and institutions I sit with there. I see clients, I write, I teach when the audience is the right one, and I try to keep the rest of the week free for thinking.

If you have arrived here for the research, the research page is the right place. For the writing, the journal. For everything else, the contact page reaches me directly.