My work applies approaches from political anthropology to studying community experiences of epidemic preparedness and response and humanitarian emergency interventions. I am also interested in the integration of social science perspectives in biomedical interventions and scientific research, and in particular the tensions and possibilities of interdisciplinary collaborations. I currently hold a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project titled "Crisis of Confidence: the Politics of Evidence and (Mis)Trust in Epidemic Preparedness and Response".

From 2016-20 I was a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath, where I also held an ESRC Fellowship for a project titled 'States of Emergency: Citizenship in Crisis in Sierra Leone'. In 2015-16 I worked as a Research Fellow at LSHTM based in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone, working in the Ebola Vaccine Trials (EBOVAC) and carrying out ethnographic research on community experiences of the Ebola outbreak and its associated response, a project I continue to be involved in. In 2015 I completed a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford, where my thesis explored the relationship between unemployment and political violence in post-war Sierra Leone, based on field research with young men and women in Freetown. This is now published as a book by James Currey titled "The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State: Youth, Labour and Violence in Sierra Leone " (2018)