Profile

I grew up in Malaysia and moved to the UK when I was 19 to go to university. It was equal parts challenging and exciting to move so far away from home at that age!

If there is one thing that I really enjoy, it’s music! 🎵🎶 I started playing the violin 🎻  when I was 11 but I gave it up after 5 years because I realised I wasn’t really enjoying it.  I started teaching myself to play the  guitar 🎸 when I was 16 and I’ve been writing songs ever since! I also sung and played onstage for the first time that year. I love being able to express myself in songs in ways that I can’t in real life. I listen to all sorts of music from indie to rap, depending on my mood. I also find that listening to a variety of music inspires me when I write songs.

Besides music, my other love is food. Food is life! 😍 A few years ago, I became a vegetarian and tried veganism for a bit too. I enjoy cooking and I’ve started baking recently. It’s been a real journey but I’m proud to say that my latest Jaffa chocolate drizzle cake was my most successful bake! 🎂🍰 I also absolutely love coffee. The 8 months of my life when I trained as a barista was probably the most fun I’ve had!

During the weekend, I read loads. I enjoy reading because it takes my mind to a different world without having to actually travel there. Some of my favourite books include “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo, “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng and “One Day” by David Nicholls. I sometimes wish I have more time to read, but I do it whenever I can!

Being a queer, ethnic minority woman, I am also a passionate advocate for equality and inclusion. I try my best to contribute to this cause by speaking at workshops and getting myself involved in projects on equality and inclusion. 🏳️‍🌈

Sometimes people feel less good about the way they look and other times they don’t. Sometimes this feeling lasts for a short while, but other times, this feeling might last longer. The way people think and feel about their bodies is called ‘body image’ and my work revolves around this.

There are many reasons why this may be. Some research says that people tend to want to look like the types of people that they see most. For example, when people watch lots of TV shows with fit actors in them, or when they see lots of thin models on Instagram, or when they play with Barbie dolls loads, they sometimes feel like they want to look as thin or as fit as those people. All these mean that the way we want our bodies to look depend a lot on the environments that we are in and sometimes, when we don’t look as thin or fit as the people on TV or social media, we may not feel good about ourselves.

My research studies why this affects some people more than others and how this affects different people – for example, people from ethnic minority groups and people with different social and economic backgrounds.

I spend a lot of time on the computer doing different things. Sometimes I have meetings to organise events and activities to support other PhD students in my university; sometimes I do lots of writing to tell people what I’ve found in my research; sometimes I create surveys and send those out to people; sometimes I interview people on Zoom to find out more about their lives and sometimes I analyse data using statistics using computer softwares.

My work is never the same every day and that’s the part that I love most about it!