I graduated from The University of Glasgow in 1981 with a BSc in Physiology. I then completed an MSc in Quantitative Methods applied to Physiology at Imperial College, University of London, before going to St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford to complete my DPhil in Vergence Eye Movements in Dyslexia under the supervision of Professor John Stein.
I then spent two years in industry working for Permobil – a company that manufactured an eye movement tracker for use in research. I returned to academia in 1990, taking up a Post Doctoral Research position in the Infant Study Laboratory of the Department of Psychology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, under the guidance of Professor Louise Hainline and Professor Israel Abramov. Here I learnt how to test infants, as much as there was to know about the development of accommodation and vergence, and, probably most importantly, how to build my own equipment. I also started my lecturing career teaching courses in Introductory Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Psycophysiology, and Developmental Neuroscience. I continue to lecture in these areas.
In 1995, I returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at the University of Reading. Since then, I have been promoted, first to Senior Lecturer (January 2000), and then to Reader (October, 2008). My main research interests are
1. visual development, especially the development of accommodation and vergence
2. orthographic reading processes
3. visual deficits in specific reading disabilities (SRD)
4. the co-occurrence of developmental disorders such as SRD, developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD), attention deficit disorders (ADD and AD(h)D), and specific language impairments
5. The role of the reward pathways in preference decisions
I am a Chartered Psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Society for Research in Child Vision, Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and UK Orthographic Group.
