Meet the team
The study has relied on a vibrant group of post doc, PhD students, research assistants and undergraduate students to make it such a success.
Principal investigator
Courtenay Frazier Norbury
Courtenay’s research focuses on the overlaps between language, cognition, and social interaction across a range of neurodevelopmental conditions. She did her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and has been at UCL since 2016. For the last 10 years she has led the SCALES study, a longitudinal study of language development and disorder from school entry. She is a founding member of the RADLD campaign (https://www.youtube.com/RADLD) and President of NAPLIC (https://www.naplic.org.uk/ ). She also loves baking, cycling, and seeing her students flourish.
LiLaC members
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Sarah Griffiths
SCALES Research Associate
Sarah joined the LiLaC Lab in 2018 as a Research Associate for SCALES. Her research focuses on understanding links between language, emotion processing and mental health in young people with neurodevelopmental conditions. She coordinated development of the “Words for Wellbeing” public engagement exhibition and animated YouTube video showcasing research on links between language and emotional wellbeing. Since 2019, she has taught statistics to undergraduate psychology students at UCL, leading the switch from SPSS to R to promote reproducible science. -
Laura Lucas
SCALES Research Assistant
Laura joined LiLaC Lab in 2018 as a Research Assistant for SCALES. She has a background in Psychology and completed an MSc in Developmental Disorders. She manages the day-to-day running of SCALES and is the primary contact for schools and families. Laura assisted in the development of our Words for Wellbeing public engagement events and YouTube video, and is also responsible for the management of the SCALES website and Twitter page. -
Joanne Saul
Post-doc & Teaching Fellow
Jo has been a member of the LiLaC lab since 2016, when she started her ESRC-funded PhD. She is fascinated by individual differences in language development and how language impairment impacts mental health, learning and wellbeing. Jo is interested in intervention development and evaluation, particularly in how technology may be able to make interventions more accessible to help those with complex neurodevelopmental conditions. Jo is a member of Autistica’s Language and Communication Study Group and volunteers on the committee of her local branch of the National Autistic Society.
Jo's PhD focussed on expressive language development in minimally verbal autistic pre-schoolers. She conducted a longitudinal study exploring what predicts individual differences in expressive language development, in particular the role of speech production skills. She also created and piloted an app which delivered a speech sound intervention. Together with LiLaC colleagues Jo is helping to deliver a new undergraduate Research Methods curriculum. She will also be supporting new students enrolled on the BSc Psychology course and teaching Speech and Language Therapy students about single case experimental design.
PhD Students
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Ria Bernard
PhD Student
Ria is a PhD student investigating the relationship between stammering and mental health in children, under the supervision of Professor Courtenay Norbury. Ria’s research is funded by the ESRC and Action for Stammering Children, where she works weekly on policy impact and outreach as part of her PhD programme. Ria is also a qualified Speech & Language Therapist (SLT) who worked in mainstream primary and secondary schools across deprived areas of south and east London before joining the team. She completed her MSc in Neuroscience at UCL, working with Professor Peter Howell on her dissertation, in which she explored the impact of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) alongside fluency shaping therapy approaches on speech fluency in adults who stammer. -
Disa Witkowska
PhD Student
Disa is a PhD student at UCL. Disa’s project, under the supervision of Professor Courtenay Norbury, will seek to find the best methods of supporting English language learning in primary school children with English as an Additional Language (EAL). Disa joined LiLaC Lab as a BA Linguistics student in the summer of 2017 to transcribe narratives from the SCALES study. Interested in bilingualism, in her undergraduate project she investigated the narrative (storytelling) development in children learning EAL and their monolingual peers. Disa's MRes Speech, Language and Cognition project explored whether a syntactic priming picture-card game can facilitate grammar learning in children with EAL.
Collaborators
Alumni
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Jessica Banks
Former Research Assistant
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Gracie New
Former Research Assistant
now studying a Doctorate in Educational Psychology @ University of Southampton -
Lydia Yeomans
PhD Student
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Chatrin Suksasilp
Student Research Assistant
Former UCL student, now studying MSci Psychological Research at University of Oxford. -
Charlotte Wray
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Claire Sears
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Harriet Maydew
Graduate Research Assistant on SCALES
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