About

I am a counsellor, clinical supervisor, educator and researcher with a longstanding interest in how people make sense of difficult, uncertain and often life-changing experiences.

In September 2026, I will join the University of Canberra as a Senior Lecturer in Counselling. My academic work brings together many of the areas that have shaped my career: counselling practice and education, grief and bereavement, end-of-life care, supervision, and the ways we understand and respond to complex forms of loss and distress.

My path to counselling and academia has been somewhat unconventional. I spent the first 20 years of my career as a criminal defense investigator in the US, primarily working on capital murder cases where the death penalty was a reality. I later returned to university to study counselling psychology, beginning my clinical work in hospice care before moving into research, teaching, and academia. Much of my professional life has brought me into contact with death, grief, uncertainty, and profound change - and with people trying to make sense of experiences that cannot simply be undone or resolved. Those experiences have shaped my enduring interest in how we live with loss and uncertainty, find meaning in changed circumstances, and how we adapt when there is no possibility of returning to life as it was before.

Today my research focuses on climate grief and distress and how counsellors can understand and respond to the emotional and psychological impacts of a changing climate. I am particularly interested in applying established grief theories—including ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, and anticipatory grief—to climate-related experiences, and in exploring how these frameworks can help counsellors recognize and support forms of grief that may be ongoing, uncertain, collective, and not always socially acknowledged.

Alongside my research, I have spent many years teaching and supervising emerging counsellors. I have taught counselling in Australia and internationally, including Murdoch University in Western Australia and Yorkville University in Canada. I am especially interested in helping counsellors move beyond simply learning techniques or theories toward developing the capacity to think critically, tolerate complexity, and understand why they practice as they do.

Clinical practice remains an important part of how I understand counselling. I have worked as a counsellor for more than 16 years across private practice, health and educational settings, and I continue to provide a limited amount of counselling and clinical supervision. My approach is integrative, reflective and grounded in the belief that good counselling begins with understanding the person and their context rather than fitting their experience into a predetermined model.

I also provide professional development, consultation and training, particularly in grief and loss, end-of-life care, climate distress, counselling practice and clinical supervision.

Across these different roles, I find myself returning to many of the same questions: How do people make sense of experiences that fundamentally change their understanding of themselves or their world? What happens when there is no simple resolution or "moving on"? And how can counsellors remain thoughtful, curious and genuinely useful in the presence of experiences they cannot fix?

This website is a place to bring some of those strands together. Along with information about my academic, clinical and professional work, I occasionally write about grief, counselling, supervision, climate distress and other ideas that emerge from my research, teaching and practice.