She studied at Oxford and Plymouth, before moving to Swansea in 2006 to do a PhD on the foraging behaviour of diving birds, using animal tracking loggers. She then transferred her loyalties from the sea to the air, working on Andean condors through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Emily now has a foot in both camps, with projects examining the flight behaviour of vultures and seabirds, and how the movements and ecology of birds are influenced by airflows. She is about to start a large project, which will involve training birds to fly in a specially constructed wind tunnel at Swansea University, in order to investigate the energetic costs of flight.