About
Nikki is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Her research focuses on the socio-cognitive processes involved in extreme teamwork and decision-making. She is an applied social psychologist who conducts research with practitioners across a range of extreme teams (e.g., Emergency Services, NHS, Nuclear industry). She has two main strands to her research. First, she conducts research on indecision and decision inertia to understand the psychological processes that underpin choice derailments in crisis situations. Second, she explores the psychology of interoperability to identify ways to promote teamwork in complex multi-team systems. She takes a mixed methods approach to research, adopting quantitative and qualitative techniques including cognitive task analysis, interviewing, observations, and simulations.
She won a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2025, and will be leading a project titled "Beyond Teamwork: The Psychology of Extreme Teams" over the next four years. The project will answer the research question: what are the critical factors underlying effective teamwork in extreme environments? Research objectives include:
- Map and compare the organisational, psychological, and social processes involved in emergency teamwork internationally, identifying shared and contrasting challenges and solutions to effective teamwork and new technology.
- Build a taxonomy of the similar and differing processes involved in extreme teamwork across extreme team types (e.g., emergency teams, space teams, healthcare), providing novel and nuanced understanding on how extreme teams operate across task and environmental contexts.
- Develop novel insight into the process and consequences of social friction in extreme teams, specifically how maladaptive social interactions develop, operate, and their consequences to the teamwork episode and beyond.
- Explore the role of AI within extreme teams exploring its potential and limitations to support extreme teamwork.