Dr. Liam Cross is a Lecturer in Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth. He has a BSc in Psychology from Lancaster University and a PhD in Psychology from Leeds Beckett University. His PhD focused on how and why synchronous movement affects interpersonal relations and group processes. He is interested in intra- and inter-personal dynamics, such as affiliation, cooperation, conformity and social identity. He studies this in autistic people using digital technologies, including Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Beyond this, he has a keen interest in gamification and how games can be used to improve the social experiences of autistic people while teaching important skills. His teaching interests include Social Psychology, Research Methods, and Statistics.
Dr. Gray Atherton is a Lecturer in Psychology at the School of Psychology (Faculty of Health), University of Plymouth. She
received a BSc in Child Development from Vanderbilt University in 2010, a Master’s in Counselling from the University of Houston in 2014, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Individual Differences from the University of Houston in 2018. Prior to entering academia, she was a counselor for adolescents with neurodevelopmental conditions. She has previously lectured at the University of Houston and the University of Wolverhampton. Her interests include understanding how neurodiverse people see the social world. Specifically, she explores individual differences in social processing and how these differences often found in autistic people also exist in the general population. She is particularly interested in understanding the strengths inherent to neurodiversity and how these strengths can be used to challenge stigma and misunderstandings about developmental conditions such as autism.
