Emma received an MA in Physics at University of Oxford in 1994. She achieved a PhD in Physics at Imperial College in 1999. She was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam from 1999 to 2001, and then held a Postdoctoral position at Imperial College from 2003 to 2004.
Emma joined the CLF as a Laser Scientist in 2004. She was promoted to Target Area Scientist in 2006, then to Artemis Section Leader in 2007. In 2010, she was promoted to Artemis Group Leader.
Emma has led the Artemis group since the facility opened to users. She managed the original project to build the facility, and the recent £3 million upgrade of the facility in new lab-space in the Research Complex at Harwell. She is one of the principal investigators on the £17 million HiLUX project to upgrade Ultra and Artemis, which started in 2023.
Emma is an academic visitor at Imperial College and a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. She has served on scientific advisory committees for the Extreme Light Infrastructure-Delivery Consortium, the Advanced Laser Light Source in Canada, DESY and European XFEL. She has been a Programme Committee member for Ultrafast Optics, High-Intensity Lasers and High-Field Phenomena, International Conference on Extreme Light, Advanced Solid-State Lasers and CLEO, where she was a programme co-chair in 2025. She has co-authored over 100 publications.
