Hello, my name is Siobhan Merriman and I am a doctoral researcher within the Human Factors Engineering Team within the Transportation Research Group. I am passionate about exploring the best practices for conducting research and making sure that my own research meets these requirements. Throughout the whole of my education, from my A-Levels to my PhD, I have been told to make sure that there is an equal gender split between males and females, so that my research is generalisable to all genders. However I never understood why this is important, so the equal gender split became a “tick-box” exercise. By joining this group, I hope to understand why an equal gender split is important in research and to create guidelines for other researchers who are early on in their research career, like me, so that they too can understand why gender equity is important and to make sure that they consider all genders in every stage of the research process.
I have a background in Psychology (BSc, Royal Holloway University) and Human Factors and Ergonomics (MSc, University of Nottingham) and am currently undertaking a PhD investigating the training implications for drivers of automated vehicles.