My professional and academic journey has been shaped by one enduring question: how do human beings adapt when life confronts them with loss, uncertainty and profound change?

I worked as a healthcare professional 1996 and have practiced across a range of specialties since then. In 2000, I began serving in the military, including deployment on two missions as a healthcare professional in Iraq, in 2005 and 2006–2007. These experiences exposed me to different dimensions of human vulnerability, resilience and adaptation.

Alongside healthcare, I pursued my interest in psychology. I began my undergraduate studies in psychology in 2000, completing my degree in 2004, and subsequently completed an MSc in Psychological Research Methods at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2010. I later began a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology (DCPsych), which remains incomplete.

Since 2015, I have worked as a counsellor with bereaved clients. This work has deepened my particular interest in loss, death anxiety, psychological avoidance and emotional regulation.

I am interested not only in how people experience loss, but in how the human mind attempts to adapt to it. Avoidance, emotional regulation, attachment, meaning-making and changes in relationships can all be understood, at least partly, as attempts to accommodate experiences that challenge our previous sense of safety and predictability.

For me, adaptation does not necessarily mean returning to who we were before an experience. Sometimes it involves reorganising how we understand ourselves, other people and the world around us.

Human Adaptation in the Age of AI

My interest in artificial intelligence developed naturally from these broader questions about human adaptation.

AI represents more than a technological development. It is becoming part of the environment to which human beings are adapting—changing how we obtain information, communicate, make decisions and, increasingly, how we reflect upon our emotional lives.

People are already turning to conversational AI with questions about grief, relationships, loneliness, anxiety and identity. This creates a new psychological territory.

How will humans adapt to thinking alongside artificial intelligence?

What happens when a person brings emotionally significant material to a system capable of producing language that appears empathic and psychologically informed?

Can AI support reflection without replacing human relationships?

Could it facilitate emotional understanding, or might it sometimes reinforce avoidance, dependency or existing interpretations?

And what happens when material explored with AI subsequently enters the psychotherapy room?

These questions led me to develop AART-345 — AI-Assisted Reflective Therapy.

AART-345 brings together the different strands of my professional experience: healthcare work, counselling, psychological research, bereavement work and an enduring interest in the ways human beings respond and adapt to change.

My aim is not to advocate for AI as a replacement for psychotherapy. It is to investigate, carefully and critically, how humans are beginning to adapt psychologically to its presence and whether appropriately bounded, therapist-guided AI reflection can have a constructive place within that adaptation.

Technology will continue to change. My interest lies in the human being adapting alongside it.