We welcome Dr Sally Reynard to the SPRINT team, who has joined us as a Research Associate after completing her PhD in Applied Psychology at the University of Birmingham.
Sally’s PhD focused on the international collaborative development of a prototype smartphone game called BRAINZ. BRAINZ aims to help children to learn about controlling their emotions, which is an important skill that can impact upon all areas of life from a young age.
Sally worked with lots of different people to create the game—from the children who would be playing it, to graphic designers, engineers, gamers, psychologists and playwrights.
You can read Sally’s first publication from her PhD here, where she presents the findings from a review of the evidence on digital tools to train emotion control in children and adolescents.
One of the things that Sally enjoyed the most about her PhD was getting to meet and work with lots of different people from around the UK and Europe. This included meeting children and their parents at a Brain Awareness Week event in 2022 at the MAC in Birmingham. Here, Sally and some of the BRAINZ development team showcased the game and explained how it was developed.
Before completing her PhD, Sally did a Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at Aston University and also holds degrees in Psychology and Sport Science. Her Masters dissertation focused on the use of electroencephalography (EEG), which is a cap that measures electrical signals from the human brain. Sally used this to try to predict what people were listening to whilst they completed an attention task. The dissertation within her Sport Science degree focused on the use of mental imagery techniques to prevent debilitative pre-competition anxiety in rugby players.
Sally has also been lucky to work in occupational health and in-patient psychiatric settings in the past, where she worked alongside diverse multidisciplinary teams to support people back to health. As well as this, Sally has volunteered at a brain injury charity called Headway, and has recently conducted a Teaching Fellow post at the University.
Sally is very much looking forward to applying her broad experience to support the work in the SPRINT team.
In her spare time, Sally enjoys running and looking after and riding her ex-racehorse. She has previously completed the Great North Run, where she was sadly beaten by Mo Farah!
Written by Dr Sally Reynard, Research Associate for the SPRINT Project.