The research team includes lead investigators Nikki Botting and Lucy Henry, team members at City St George’s, University of London, and a wider group of expert research collaborators across five other universities.
Nikki Botting
Nikki Botting is a Professor of Developmental Disorders at City St George’s, University of London. She is one of the Co-Leads of the BICYCLE project. Her interests lie in investigating the journeys of children with atypical profiles and neurodivergence, and in understanding how talking and thinking skills develop over time. She previously co-led the Manchester Language Study, one of the largest longitudinal projects, which followed children with language and communication difficulties into early adulthood. More recently, Nikki has become interested in exploring wider impacts on communication including social disadvantage, social care, and the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Lucy Henry
Lucy Henry is a Professor of Speech and Language at City St George’s, University of London and Co-Director of the Centre for Language and Communication Science Research. She is also a Chartered Clinical Psychologist and Co-Lead of the BICYCLE study. Lucy’s research focuses on the development of executive functioning (high level thinking skills), memory, language, and school achievement in children and young people. She is interested in how these skills develop and relate to each other during the school years, and in the impact of COVID lockdowns. Lucy brings a wealth of experience to the BICYCLE project, having led many previous research projects on language and executive functioning in children with neurotypical and neurodivergent profiles (e.g., language difficulties, autism, intellectual disability, dyspraxia).
Chelo Del Rosario
Dr Chelo Del Rosario is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at City St George’s, University of London. She completed her PhD in developmental psychology and is now part of the BICYCLE team. Her research interests focus on exploring the factors that shape child development across different groups. Her role on the BICYCLE project includes organising the study, finding families to join in, and meeting all the parents and children involved in this research.
Jane Flynn
Jane Flynn completed an MSc in Speech and Language Therapy at City St George’s, University of London in 2019. Prior to joining the BICYCLE study as a research assistant, she worked in the evaluation team at the children’s charity Speech and Language UK. She will be supporting with the set-up and delivery of the BICYCLE study.
Becky Moss
Dr Becky Moss is a social scientist and clinical linguist with over 25 years of experience working in healthcare communication research, with both clinicians and service users, and leading on Parent, Patient and Public Involvement. She uses qualitative research methods such as focus groups, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation to enrich and illuminate quantitative data from large scale studies. Becky also uses inclusive methods such as co-design with people with lived experience and minoritised groups. Her fields of healthcare expertise include neonatal care and prematurity, stroke and aphasia, and quality of life.
Stian Reimers
Stian Reimers is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Science, and a researcher in judgement and decision making. He is interested in how people make decisions, particularly those with financial implications, and the policy implications that decision-making processes and biases may have. He is also currently Co-Director of Educational Enhancement and Digital Innovation for the School of Health and Psychological Sciences. He has a background in web-based research methods, and in designing and building engaging online tasks to measure psychological variables, both in academic projects and working for the BBC and other production companies.
Elisabeth Hill
Professor Elisabeth Hill joined City St George’s as Deputy President in September 2022 and is Professor of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Her research focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders, and particularly developmental co-ordination disorder (sometimes referred to as dyspraxia or DCD) and autism, as well as the relationship between cognitive, social, and motor development in typical and atypical populations, and their broader impacts on mental health, academic and employment outcomes. Further strands of research within this sphere consider the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on these developmental relationships, and their impact on children and their parents within daily life, educational experience, and outcomes.
Catherine Davies
Cat Davies is a Professor of Language Development and the Dean for Research Culture at the University of Leeds, where she also leads the Leeds Child Development Unit. Her research focuses on children’s early language, literacy, and education; most recently investigating the effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns on children’s language environment and development.
Nayeil Gonzalez-Gomez
Dr Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez is a Reader in Psychology and Assistant Director of the Centre for Psychological Research at Oxford Brookes University. She leads the Oxford Brookes Babylab, where she tries to understand the roots of language acquisition, by exploring speech perception in infancy. She is interested in infants’ capacity to learn phonological properties that occur in their native language, the mechanisms by which these native properties are acquired, and how prior knowledge about these properties supports later lexical acquisition, such as word segmentation and early word learning. She is also very interested in investigating the effect that environmental and maturational factors such as preterm birth, socioeconomic status or a pandemic have on early language acquisition.
Alex Hendry
Dr Alex Hendry is an NIHR and Castang Foundation Advanced Fellow. Her research centres on developing ways to identify and help children most likely to struggle with executive functions – the thinking and regulation skills that help us to plan, solve problems and control our impulses. She is committed to empowering parents to foster their children’s development in achievable and enjoyable ways and leads the START (Supporting Toddlers with a connection to autism or ADHD to develop strong Attention, Regulation and Thinking skills) early intervention programme, as well as the Playful Packs project. Alex collaborates on several longitudinal studies of executive function development and has developed a range of play-based and parent-report measures including the Problem-Solving Box task, the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire and the Parental Self Efficacy and Barriers Questionnaire.
Laura Shapiro
Dr Laura Shapiro’s core expertise is longitudinal research investigating the causes and consequences of language and literacy development using statistical causal modelling. She has been Principal Investigator on three UKRI projects, leading teams of researchers in the UK and internationally to conduct research crossing developmental, health and educational psychology, using experimental, longitudinal, and qualitative methodologies. This work is shaped both by fundamental scientific questions and by the concerns of practitioners and policy makers
Michelle McGillion
Dr Michelle McGillion is a developmental psychologist at the University of Warwick. Using quantitative (experimental, observational, and training study designs) and qualitative methods, her research focuses on language development and the factors that impact on the early communicative environment; why we see differences in children’s communicative skill; and how language development can be best supported across diverse populations.
