Her father, Jo Moran was a credit draper and ornithologist, mountaineer and wildlife photographer.
He was the first person to photograph the Leach's Petrel at the nest, and the first to climb the cliffs of the Noup of Noss in Shetland.
[2] She studied geography at Christ Church, University of Oxford, graduating in 1995 with a First and the Gibbs Prize,[3] and then completed a DPhil in geography at Hertford College, Oxford[1] where she held the Mortimer May Senior Scholarship 1996–2000.
[4] After research fellowships at the Universities of Warwick and Birmingham, Moran moved in 2004 to a lectureship at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, where she was made professor in Carceral Geography in 2018.
She participated in a 'Locked-Up Living' podcast in 2021, talking about her research[14] into nature contact in prison.