My research at Oxford has been primarily funded by the UK Health and Safety Executive, and has addressed issues of work-related stress in a wide range of occupational groups, including health-care professionals, civil servants, police officers, and trainee teachers; most recently, the work has focused on the UK oil and gas industry, both onshore and offshore. In working with these groups, the main areas of interest are the psychosocial environment (including workload, time pressures, job control, and social support), work hours (particularly shift work), and physical environment stressors, in relation to health and safety outcomes; individual differences in personality, coping responses, and health behaviours, and their roles in the stress process, are also topics of major interest. Methodologically, the research aims to combine subjective and objective measures of stressors and outcomes, in the context of longitudinal data collection based on 'natural experiments' in real-world settings. Several researchers have contributed to successive HSE-funded research projects: Davina Rendall, Clare Mendham, Melanie Clark, Esther Payne-Cook, Jill Byron, Susan Carnell, and Elly Farmer.

I completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and subsequently moved to Loughborough University where I obtained an M.Sc in Ergonomics, followed by a Ph.D based on research into human factors aspects of high-speed, low-level flight. During the course of my PhD research, I was appointed to a Lectureship at Loughborough, which I held for some six years including a sabbatical year at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the area of stress research with Richard S Lazarus and his colleagues.  I returned to Oxford in 1976, to undertake a two-year M.Sc. course in Abnormal Psychology. During this course, I carried out a research project (a longitudinal study of stress among student nurses) which subsequently developed into a long-term programme of research into occupational stress funded by the UK Health and Safety Executive at Oxford University.