Long before I knew what behaviour analysis was, I knew what it felt like to be on the other side of services.
I grew up in the care system, and I am the sibling of an autistic person with learning disabilities. I grew up around professionals, meetings, assessments and decisions that could have a significant impact on people's lives. Those experiences have stayed with me, and they have shaped the questions I now find myself asking as I develop as a behaviour analyst.
Who gets heard? Who gets to decide what a good life looks like? Whose outcomes are we working towards? And how do we make sure that the people our work is supposed to benefit remain at the centre of it?
For me, those are not abstract questions.
Today, I am undertaking my PhD at Queen's University Belfast, supervised by Dr Nichola Booth and Dr Jenny Ferguson. I am also a Practising Registrant with the UK Society for Behaviour Analysis, and alongside my studies I work full-time. My experience has taken me across education, social care, family and community settings, but I have never wanted my professional experience to make me forget what it feels like to experience systems from the other side.
That is a large part of why I am putting myself forward for the EABA board.
I love behaviour analysis. I believe in the science and in what it can offer. But I also believe that caring about a field means being willing to think deeply about what we want that field to become.
I want a behaviour analysis that is scientifically rigorous and deeply human. One that values data without losing sight of the person represented by those data. One that is willing to listen when people challenge us. One that takes culture, context, dignity, assent and lived experience seriously. And one that continues asking whether the things we are working towards are meaningful to the people whose lives are affected by our work.I think students have an important role in building that future.
Being a student does not mean I automatically know what other students need. My first responsibility would be to listen.
There is no single European student experience. We come from different countries, cultures and universities. We speak different languages. We enter behaviour analysis through different routes and at different stages of our lives. Some people can dedicate themselves entirely to their studies. Others are studying while working, completing supervised practice, raising families or managing countless other responsibilities.
I want those different experiences to have somewhere to go.
I would like to create clearer and more regular ways for students to communicate with their representative and know what happens to the issues they raise. I would also like to help create more opportunities for students across Europe to find one another, share research and ideas, learn from researchers and practitioners outside their own universities, and participate in EABA rather than simply observe it from the edges.
I am particularly interested in the space between studying behaviour analysis and becoming a behaviour analyst.
We can learn the principles, terminology, research methods and ethical frameworks of our science, but eventually we have to walk into the real world and use them. That world is complicated. We work with people whose experiences may be completely different from our own. We work alongside families, schools, services and other professions. We encounter systems with competing priorities. We encounter different cultures and values. Sometimes we get things wrong.
I think there is enormous value in students and early-career behaviour analysts across Europe having more opportunities to talk about that transition openly and to learn from one another.
And perhaps that is what excites me most about EABA itself.
I am Lithuanian, and although all my education and professional life has been in the UK, that part of who I am has always mattered to me. It probably also shapes why the idea of a European behaviour analytic community resonates with me. Europe is not one culture or one way of
doing things. It is made up of different languages, histories, communities and systems, and I think there is something incredibly valuable about creating a professional community where those differences allow us to learn from one another rather than keeping us apart.
I would like to see an EABA where a student beginning their journey in Lithuania, the UK, Spain, Italy or anywhere else in Europe can feel that they belong to the same wider community. Where students can contribute their research, ideas and experiences regardless of where they are studying. Where established researchers and practitioners remain accessible to the next generation. Where lived experience has a place alongside professional expertise. And where we remain ambitious not only about growing behaviour analysis, but about the kind of behaviour analysis we are growing.
I would bring experience in leadership, strategy, communication and working with data to the board. I would bring my developing experience as a researcher and behaviour analyst. I would also bring the perspective of somebody who grew up experiencing services before ever imagining that one day I might become one of the professionals working within them.
But I would come to the role knowing that I still have an enormous amount to learn.
I don't see that as a weakness. I think it is exactly why student representation matters.
Students are sometimes spoken about as the "future" of a profession. I understand the sentiment, but I think it misses something important.
We are already here.
We are already conducting research, working in services, supporting people, asking difficult questions and deciding what kind of practitioners we want to become.
If elected, I would be incredibly proud to represent that community on the EABA board and to help make sure that students are not simply prepared for the future of behaviour analysis in Europe, but have a genuine voice in shaping it.