I first travelled to Nepal in 1992 as a volunteer with School's Partnership Worldwide (SPW), and was posted to a government school in Kalopani, Lete, Mustang district, Nepal. During my nine months in Nepal, I learned some Nepali and Thakali, and became interested in socio-cultural life, ritual practice and shamanism. I returned to the UK to study at the University of Cambridge, changing my focus of study from languages to archaeology and anthropology.

I returned to Nepal in the summer of 1994 to research issues around language and identity among the Thakali communities of Mustang and Myagdi. This study was subsequently published in Nepal. After graduating from Cambridge, I had the opportunity to pursue my doctoral research through the Himalayan Languages Project of the then Department of Comparative Linguistics (VTW) at Leiden University, under the supervision of Professor Dr Frederick Kortlandt and Professor Dr George van Driem. My research focussed on the Thangmi language, spoken by upwards of 30,000 people in Dolakha and Sindhupalcok districts of eastern Nepal. I received my doctoral degree in 2006 and am presently preparing a grammar of the Thangmi language for publication in Brill's Language of the Greater Himalayan Region, a sub-series within the Tibetan Studies Library.

In December 2000, together with Professor Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison and Sara Shneiderman, I established the Digital Himalaya Project through which we have digitised a large corpus of films, photos and journals from the Himalayan region which are freely viewable and downloadable from the project website. From October 2002, for a period of three years, I was based at the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University as a visiting scholar. Starting in May 2004, I was a Visiting Scientist for one year at ICIMOD's Culture, Equity, Gender and Governance (CEGG) programme in Nepal. In 2004 and 2005, I also worked on short contracts with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal (UN OHCHR-Nepal) as an international interpreter.

In 2005 and 2006, I directed the first modern linguistic survey of the Indian state of Sikkim, with the logistical support of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok. From January to April 2007, I was employed as an anthropologist and fieldwork coordinator in the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP), a DoBeS project based at Leipzig and Tribhuvan universities which is undertaking the primary linguistic and ethnographic documentation of two endangered Kiranti languages of Nepal. From May 2007 to June 2008, I worked at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), as Chief of the Translation and Interpretation Unit. For the remainder of 2008, I was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. In January 2009, I established the World Oral Literature Project at the University of Cambridge. Other recent research interests include: the politics of language and ethnicity in the Himalayas, Nepali traders and workers in India and Tibet, digital tools in anthropology, visual ethnography and journalism.