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I graduated with a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1998 and completed my MSc at the Centre for Research on Computational Applied Mechanics (CERECAM) in 2000. After working for a year as a civil engineer, I returned to UCT as a researcher at the Centre for Minerals Research, where I focused on developing and validating numerical models for granular flow. In 2004, I began my PhD under Daya Reddy at CERECAM, investigating finite element formulations for non-classical models of plasticity to capture scale effects. After graduating in 2008, I continued my research at CERECAM as a research officer until I started post-doctoral studies in 2010 under Paul Steinmann at the Chair of Applied Mechanics, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. My research primarily involves non-classical models of diffusion and mechanics at surfaces and interfaces, as well as homogenization. I returned to Cape Town in 2012 as a senior researcher at CERECAM and joined the University of Glasgow as a Senior Lecturer in January 2016, becoming a Professor of Computational Mechanics in 2021. Currently, I serve as the deputy director of the Glasgow Computational Engineering Centre (GCEC) and as Associate Head of the James Watt School of Engineering, where I am the Director for Research. Previously, I was Head of the Infrastructure & Environment Research Division.