I am a linguist with research and teaching experience in general, functional and applied linguistics, and an additional background in public health. I specialise in analysing authentic spoken and written language to explore topics in health communication, ecolinguistics and animal studies. Across these areas I am particularly interested in how people negotiate agency and identity with each other, and how they align and disalign through language and multimodal interaction, and how styles of meaning influence social justice for humans and animals. I have held nationally competitive research grants (ARC, NHMRC and tenders) on subjects such as psychotherapeutic discourse, HIV medical consultation, and embodied meaning in surgical team interaction, and I have supervised research students in clinical linguistics, medical discourse, psychotherapy practice, academic English, literary stylistics, register and intonation, and emotion in spoken language. Governance experience includes Head of Postgraduate Studies, Co-convenor of the Animal Studies Research Network (UOW), and 10 years as the Research Co-ordinator of the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University. I am co-editor of the book series Text & Social Context (University of Toronto Press), and past Vice-President of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association. Currently my main research projects are: 

• communication between clinicians and patients in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (Janssen Pharmaceuticals funding)
• end-of-life communication in heart failure (Hanbury Foundation)
• social media in resilience and resilience monitoring (Global Challenges/Australian Dept of Agriculture) 
• the entangled history of dairy marketing in Australia
• the 'animal turn' in linguistics.