About Me

Most of my life, I have lived in Victoria (Kinglake area), Australia, completing my undergraduate degree at La Trobe University (in 1999). My honours thesis was on combinatorial group theory and was supervised by Grant Cairns. I then relocated to Perth, Western Australia for my PhD under the auspices of Cheryl Praeger and Tim Penttila. My PhD thesis was titled Innately Transitive Groups which was a study of finite permutation groups which contain a transitive minimal normal subgroup (a kind of generalisation of the O’Nan-Scott theory for primitive and quasiprimitive groups).

I then shared an Australian Research Council grant with Tim Penttila which employed me as a research fellow for nearly 3 years in Perth where I began research on problems in finite geometry. The main focus of our research was on m-systems, eggs, elation generalised quadrangles, and extremal configurations of polar spaces (tight sets and m-ovoids). In September 2006, I began research in Ghent, Belgium, joining the world renown Incidence Geometry group. I was employed on a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship, for which Frank De Clerck was the chief investigator, and I was also supported by a GOA grant. In 2009, I returned to UWA and was a research associate supported by an ARC grant with Michael Giudici and Gordon Royle. From 2012 to 2016, I was an ARC Future Fellow, working on applications of algebraic combinatorics to problems in finite geometry. Since December 2016, I have been a teaching and research staff member in the UWA School of Maths & Stats.