Julie is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader (CL) for the Undergraduate Psychology Degree Programme here at University of Gloucestershire. As CL her role involves managing and monitoring the continued quality of the Psychology Programme together with the associated day to day administrative duties, and providing student care and support. This includes ensuring that the high standards set by the British Psychological Society (BPS) in order to retain accreditation for Graduate Basis for Registration (GBR) are maintained. Her teaching responsibilities extend from Undergraduate to Postgraduate levels with Julie contributing significantly to the Masters Degree in Business Psychology and the BPS Accredited Masters Degree in Occupational Psychology in addition to the undergraduate psychology degrees.

Julie completed her Doctoral thesis at Aston University in 2006. Entitled “Spatially structured cognitive models of semantic information: The implications for computerised databases” this looked at using the spatial organisation of visually presented document databases in a virtual environment information retrieval (IR) system to help identify semantically similar documents. The focus of this was to examine spatial theories of cognitive models of semantic information, and associated implications of individual differences in cognitive ability. Since then Julie’s research interests have developed towards individual differences in intelligence and personality, psychometric testing, cognition, experimental psychology, and occupational psychology.

Prior to joining the University of Gloucestershire Julie worked on a collaborative project between the Universities of Aston, Middlesex, and York entitled Improving Provision for Disabled Psychology Students — IPDPS. This project examined ways in which Psychology Programmes taught at HE level can be made more accessible to disabled students. This reflects Julie’s continued interest in Learning and Teaching as an applied pedagogical area and her commitment to maintaining and improving quality learning and teaching and student development in HE particularly with respect to accessibility and diversity.

Julie is a Chartered Psychologist with the BPS (CPsychol) and since arriving at the University of Gloucestershire has begun training as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist including becoming a Practitioner in Training (PIT) member of the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology. She is due to complete the Postgraduate Qualification in Occupational Psychology Stage I in July 2009. In 2008 Julie was awarded the Postgraduate Certificate of Teaching in Higher Education.

Publications

Westerman, S. J., Collins, J., & Cribbin, T. (2005). Browsing a document collection represented in two- and three-dimensional virtual information spaces. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 62(6), 713 - 736

Conference Papers & Presentations

Biggs, D.M., Collins, J. and Smith, N. (2008) Jobs and lovers: The same in the eyes of the rejected. BPS Occupational Psychology Conference 2008

Biggs, D.M., Collins, J., MacDonald, S. and Hovey, N. (2008) Attitudes of employers and recruitment agencies towards individuals with mental health needs. BPS Occupational Psychology Conference 2008

Zinkiewicz, L., Collins, J., Niyazi, A., Foreman, N., Hammond, N., and Reddy, P. (2005). Developing discipline-specific training resources to support departments in improving provision for disabled students. National Disability Team National Conference, Watford, April 2005.

Zinkiewicz, L., Hammond, N., Collins, J., Reddy, P., Niyazi, A., and Foreman, N. (2005). Improving provision for disabled psychology students. Poster presented at the BPS Quinquennial Conference, Manchester University, March 2005.

Zinkiewicz, L., Niyazi, A., Collins, J., Hammond, N., Foreman, N. and Reddy, P. (2004). Improving provision for disabled psychology students. Paper presented at the 5th. International Conference on Higher Education and Disability, Innsbruck, August 2004.

Zinkiewicz, L.,Hammond, N., Niyazi, A., Foreman, N., Reddy, P. and Collins, J. (2004). Improving provision for disabled psychology students. Workshop presented at the 2nd. Psychology Learning and Teaching Conference, University of Strathclyde, April 2004.

Collins, J. & Westerman, S. J. (2001). Browsing Patterns in a Virtual Information Space Representation of a Document Database. In M.J.Smith, G.Salvendy, D.Harris, & R.J.Koubek (Eds.), Usability Evaluation and Interface Design: Cognitive Engineering, Intelligent Agents and Virtual Reality: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 963-967). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.