Dr Christine Cuskley

About me

I am an independent researcher providing consulting in behavioural and social science, data analysis and visualisation. I have decades of experience teaching, and also run workshops in my areas of expertise for all ages and stages of education and professional development. I also spend a lot of time writing - you can check out my blog here.

Currently, I am available for one-off workshops, as well as consulting both for small-scale project components (e.g., just data visualisation) and larger scale project management and execution (e.g., full data collection and analysis pipelines for behavioural tasks). You can find out more about my consultancy on the CogKnit website. Get in touch (chrissy cogknit.uk) to enquire about how I can support your work.

I used to work as a full-time academic in UK higher education; if you want, you can :read more about my previous work.

Expertise

Crowdsourcing data, experimental online games, public engagement with impact assessment.

Emergence, evolution, and dynamics of complex agent-based systems.

Data visualisation, interactive data dashboards and online exhibits.

Contact: chrissy cogknit.uk)

I am available for research and business consulting, as well as workshops and professional development.

I'm happy to talk with members of the press or other public interest organisations about my expertise and research.

Interactives

I like to code - I trained myself using the internet. I make experiments, visualisations, and other fun things. Browse below to see the latest

Seeing Music

An online exhbition built in collaboration with Charis Saitis and Sebastian Löbbers at QMUL. Exhibition built using WebSlides, Seeing Music game developed mainly in React with Sebastian Löbbers.

Heptapod B Generator

A generator for Heptapod B symbols from the film Arrival, created for a Science Festival event with New Media Scotland. Read more here.

Coloured Vowels

An interactive visualisation of the data from Cuskley, Dingemanse, Kirby & van Leeuwen (2019). Explore the consistency and structure of vowel-colour associations in a large sample of synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. Written in p5js.

Naming Game

An interactive version of an agent-based model where agents bootstrap a vocabulary of labels for colors through interaction. Written in p5js.

Ferro Sequences

A more structured version of a sequence learning experiment which was part of a language evolution exhibit at the Deutsches Heygiene-Museum in Dresden in 2017 (explainer here). Written mainly in p5js.

Voter Model

A visualisation of an idiosyncratic version of the voter model, where nodes are pixels that adapt (or not) to their neighbors. Written in p5js.

The Void

Vent your frustration, it's listening. Written in p5js.

News Burner

One of my first successful coding projects was a Python insult generator, in the vein of the late, great Burnmaker. Plain JavaScript, mainly just using the power of regular expressions.

Find Out More

My academic background is broadly in cognitive science; first I studied psychology, (BA, American University, 2005), and then the evolution of langauge and cognition (MSc, University of Edinburgh, 2008), as well as theoretical and applied linguistics (PhD, University of Edinburgh, 2013). I have collaborated with linguists, psychologists, and complex systems scientists to study issues surrounding the emergence, evolution, and dynamics of human language.

From 2019-2025, I was a Reader in Language and Cognition at Newcastle University, working in the School of English Language, Literature and Linguistcs within the Language Evolution, Acquisition and Development (LEAD) group, and as Co-Director of the cross-faculty Cognition, Behaviour and Evolution group.

Prior to 2019, I worked at the University of Edinburgh in the Centre for Language Evolution. Before this, Iwas a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Dynamics Group based at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy from 2014-2015, and the University of Rome La Sapienza from 2013-2014. I still collaborate with colleages in Italy via the Sony Computer Science Labs in Rome.

Along the way, I've been raising two new humans with my partner - we've lived mainly in Scotland and Italy. I'm originally from New York, but I haven't lived in the US since 2007 - though I go back often. I speak decent Italian, and can blag my way through a conversation in Spanish or French.