After completing my first degree in psychology I trained and practiced clinically as an audiological scientist (testing and rehabilitating people with hearing and balance difficulties), before moving back into psychology to undertake a PhD. After a brief period as a non-clinical scientist at the MRC Unit in Numan Movement and Balance (National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square, London). I became a lecturer and then senior lecturer in Psychology as Applied to Medicine at University College London. Returning to my home town of Southampton, I was appointed a Reader and then Professor of Health Psychology. I try to warn people that I have great difficulty recognising faces due to developmental prosopagnosia or 'face-blindness', which neuroscientists are now discovering is more common than was previously thought, affecting about 1 person in 50 (https://www.faceblind.org/people/yardley08jpsychosomres.pdf). The main effect of this is to make me appear very rude when I fail to recognise people I have met, so please say Hello when you meet me - I will remember you and our previous meeting, just not your face!