She teaches and supervises research in the area of language teaching and learning. She holds a degree in French and Italian, a Masters in Theoretical Linguistics and a PhD in Computer Science. In industry, she has worked on machine translation and speech synthesis products in the language domain as well as cutting edge prototypes for telecommunications network management systems. Her research interests include second language teaching and learning, the use of technology to enhance education, in particular Computer Aided Language Learning and digital game-based learning, threshold concepts and reflection in teacher education and applying computational linguistic and corpus methodologies in educational and applied linguistics research. In 2015-16 she received a Fulbright TechImpact Award on the impact of semantic connectivity in second language acquisition.