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 the nine months that I lived in the village, I learned some Nepali and Thakali, and became interested in ritual practice and shamanism. After my return to the University of Cambridge, I changed the focus of my study from languages to archaeology and anthropology.

After two years of study, I returned to Nepal for a summer to research issues around language and identity among the Thakali of Mustang and Myagdi. This study was subsequently published in Nepal. After graduating from Cambridge, I decided 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 language and culture of the Thangmi people, 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 succeeded in digitising a large corpus of films, photos and journals from the Himalayan region. 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 had the pleasure to be 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.

As of 2005, I have been engaged in directing 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 engaged as an anthropologist and fieldwork coordinator in the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP), a DoBeS project based at Leipzig and Tribhuvan universities. The project is undertaking the 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, after which time I left Nepal. From July until the end of 2008, I am a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. 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 anthropology and journalism.