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Biography
Dr Taylor Hill is a Lecturer in Psychology and Director of the Socio-Ecological Well-Being Research Lab at the University of Dundee. Her research is broadly interested in a deceptively simple question: what makes a life go well? She approaches this question at two very different, but complementary, levels – looking both at the everyday psychological processes that shape well-being within individuals, and at the wider social, environmental, and structural conditions that shape well-being across communities and populations.
Research
At the individual level, Taylor’s work sits at the intersection of positive, personality, and motivational psychology. She is particularly interested in how people build lives that are not only happy and meaningful, but psychologically rich, and in how well-being unfolds dynamically through everyday experiences, activities, goals, and environments. In this work, she asks why the same experience might be good for one person, but not another, or good for the same person at one point in time but not another.
At the population level, Taylor studies how well-being and mental health vary across people and places. This work examines how the communities and environments in which people live may create opportunities for (or constraints on) living well, and how these processes contribute to inequalities in population mental health.
Across both strands of her research, Taylor is particularly fond of starting with messy data and questions that do not have tidy answers. Her work draws on longitudinal studies, intensive repeated-measures designs, population surveys, mixed methods, and large-scale administrative and geographic data. She is also strongly committed to open and reproducible science; recently, she founded the Tayside Coding Club, a local community for researchers interested in developing their coding and data analysis skills, sharing knowledge, and learning from one another.