Liam Blything
Liverpool,Merseyside
Summary
PhD in Quantitative Psychology and over 10 years of experience in managing and analysing large-scale behavioural & performance datasets. Expert in R programming and delivering actionable intelligence for a variety of audiences. Proven track record in providing hands-on primary research insights for evidence-based decision-making.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work history
Academic Lecturer (Teaching & Research)
University of Manchester
2024.02 - 2025.11
- Developed and delivered lectures on Experimental Psychology to BSc & MSc student groups.
- Facilitated collaborative learning environments through group discussions and peer feedback.
- Assessed student performance with comprehensive metrics & constructive feedback.
- Published performance analytics project in a peer-reviewed Journal, attracting dedicated article in The Telegraph. Revealed that timeouts by tennis players can increase the odds of recovery from a losing position by up to 82% (relative to baseline odds).
- Led the highest-sample study to date on a leading cognitive theory for how we learn language.
Senior research scientist
University of Liverpool
2021.03 - 2024.02
- Conducted innovative research projects in cognitive science to advance knowledge about how language is learned by humans (versus large language models).
- Developed experimental methodologies to enhance research efficiency and accuracy.
- Presented ambiguous language (e.g., Samuel told Oliver about a picture of himself) to humans and LLMs, reporting correlations of up to 90%. This informed child language and NLP researchers of similarities in learning mechanisms.
- Won Prestigious Travel Award to visit Texas University for 2 months and collaborate with their computational linguistics department.
- 10 studies published in 2 prestigious journals.
- Presented research findings at academic conference tin Washington DC, USA.
Senior research scientist
University of Alberta (Canada)
Edmonton Alberta (Canada), Alberta (Canada)
2018.08 - 2021.02
- Implemented novel eye-tracking techniques to measure implicit behaviours by humans.
- Regularly created reproducible workflows for cleaning & analyzing eye-tracking data (millions of by-millisecond response datapoints per screen interest area per participant), applying time-series models (GAMM).
- Published two first-author projects on how eye-gaze reflects thinking patterns,
- Mentored multiple graduate students in the running/analysis of their experiments.
Research scientist
Lancaster University
2016.09 - 2018.08
- Developed quantitative metrics from classroom conversations.
- Collaborated with interdisciplinary teams in Linguistics, Psychology, and Education.
- Published the first large-scale evidence of its kind: Analysis informed teachers of useful question types: every ten “why/how” questions asked by a teacher was associated with a 3.9x increase in the amount of children’s causal answers.
Education
PhD & MSc - Quantitative Psychology
Lancaster University
/2011 - /2016
BSc - Psychology
University of Liverpool
Liverpool2010
Skills
KEY TECHNICAL SKILLS
Statistical Modelling (R studio): A/B testing GLM/GLMM (crossed, nested) Frequentist & Bayesian GAMM time-series power analysis data simulation Quasi-experiment Advanced visualisation (ggplot2)
Data Management & Governance (R Studio, SQL): Cleaning, validation, transformation, & integration of large-scale datasets reproducible analysis workflows (R Markdown) Data governance
Reporting Summaries: Performance reports in R Markdown, PowerPoint, and Power BI
Other tools: Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) AWS GitHub Online Data Collection Evaluations of Large Language Models with hugging Face APIs in Python
RESEARCH AND LEADERSHIP SKILLS
Project Management: Led end-to-end projects from literature-review to publication Full list available on google scholar: https://scholargooglecom/citations?user=jkRouz4AAAAJ&hl=en
Mentorship: As a Lecturer, I oversaw at least 8 undergraduate research projects per year - ensuring quality, ethical compliance, and keeping them on-schedule for deadlines
Thought leader & methods innovator: Developed novel designs/methods to challenge traditional theories (eg, my PhD developed the first touch-screen to simplify a children’s language task)
Skilled Communicator: 2025 featured presentations at conferences in Washington DC, University of Reading, and a Keynote at a leading seminar series in cognitive science (audience: Senior Academics)
Translating complex analytics for External stakeholders Knowledge exchange partnership with Schools (presentations, student placements) Presented to project funding councils (ESRC) Advised policy makers (education curriculum to sport industry) Negotiated with Academic Journal reviewers
Collaborations in 4 separate (interdisciplinary) research teams
Custom
- Of my 10 peer-reviewed publications in highly rigorous scientific journals, EIGHT are as first author - this exceeds sector benchmarks for early-career researchers in cognitive science.
- Work cited in The New York Times and The Telegraph for its applied data-driven insights.
Timeline
Academic Lecturer (Teaching & Research)
University of Manchester
2024.02 - 2025.11
Senior research scientist
University of Liverpool
2021.03 - 2024.02
Senior research scientist
University of Alberta (Canada)
2018.08 - 2021.02
Research scientist
Lancaster University
2016.09 - 2018.08
PhD & MSc - Quantitative Psychology
Lancaster University
/2011 - /2016
BSc - Psychology
University of Liverpool