I am a social scientist and applied statistician based at Lancaster University’s Medical School, in the Centre for Health Informatics, Computing and Statistics. I am a Lecturer in Biostatistics (Health Informatics) and, since 2023, the School’s Deputy Research Director. I am drawn to cross-disciplinary research that pushes the boundaries of more than one field.

My expertise is in applying and developing methods for big data: routinely collected, longitudinal and time-series data. I have a growing record of collaboration and impact across health and social sciences, psychology and statistics. For the past five years much of my work has focused on mental health, including a close collaboration with Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust (LSCFT). There, I support the Trust’s use of data science to improve care and to address inequalities in access to services and lead a research group of PhD students and MSc students that work with trust data.   This work has broadened my research towards mixed methods and practice informed by lived experience. Since 2026, I also co-lead the data science theme of the recently funded, multimillion-pound NIHR Mental Health Research Group (2026–2031). In addition to this, I also work with literacy and psychology researchers on big datasets from digital learning tools, studying how young readers learn and how to close the literacy attainment gap.

My collaborative research has been published in leading journals in statistics, social science, psychology and health. It has been funded by ESRC, EPSRC, NIHR, the Medical Research Foundation and North West Cancer Research. I chaired the organising committee of the NIHR Statistics Conference (2022–23) and contribute to national NIHR Statistics and Routine Data groups. You can find more here or on my Google Scholar page. 

I was born in a small town near Moscow and grew up between Moscow and Kharkiv. I came to the UK to study economics (City, University of London, and Toulouse School of Economics), then political science at UCL. I completed a PhD in Computational Social Science at UCL in 2018 (awarded 2019), funded by the ESRC. After, I went on to teach statistics in psychology at Edinburgh and to research statistical methods at Edinburgh and Lancaster. That path led me to mental health research, which has widened how I think about methods and questions. Along the way I have lived and worked in London, Toulouse, Edinburgh and now Lancaster.

Alongside my core training, I have long been interested in philosophy, sociology and gender studies. I now focus on them more as Dean of Social Science and Gender Studies at Svobodny University where I led and support colleagues since 2022. In today’s political and educational climate, I believe knowledge needs both different lenses and a wide-angled approach. I also mentor researchers through programmes including CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics) and Science at Risk, and support academics in exile. 

Finally, I write poetry, essays and prose in Russian and English. My first book, Cycles of Nature, was published by the independent publisher shell(f) in 2026, and you can read about other literary work here. As a researcher I also  look for ways science, research and art can speak to each other. I recently took part in Lancaster Arts’ Data Science Artist Residency, working with an artist to translate and challenge findings from data science. Broadly, I am interested what connects the patterns we find in data with those that cannot be measured. Bridging academic and literary lense allows me to do that.