PacLab Graduates

Emily has been a Research Associate at PEDAL, examining children’s play with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) toys in the early years, exploring the risks and opportunities of GAI toys with a focus on young children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Emily previously completed her PhD in PEDAL, researching children’s play communication and early relationships. Her research focused on children’s conversations with their friends and peers during free-play and drawing activities, as well as fathers’ experiences of toy play and book sharing with their infants.

She has also worked at Anna Freud evaluating interventions aiming to improve young people’s mental health and reduce violence.

Emma’s work involves conducting a scoping review of play-based interventions for social communication outcomes for autistic children (aged 2-8 years). This involves summarising existing research on the basis of different characteristics, including different types of interventions, outcomes and study design.

Twitter: @EmmaPritchard95.  

Stephanie is passionate about exploring what it means to have play at the heart of education, particularly in Global South contexts. Her research focuses on how play can find expressions across neurodivergent and geo-political dimensions. As a LEGO Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholar, her PhD project explores educators’ experiences and practices around a contextually grounded South African pedagogy of play for autistic learners. Stephanie is a South African trained research psychologist. 

Stephanie is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She is Co-Investigator on the John Fell-funded Oxford Hope Project, where she explores culturally sensitive methods to understand how marginalised students conceptualise hope for education in contexts of precarity. Her efforts are focused on exploring the hopes and aspirations of British Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage students toward elite universities.

Sarah completed her PhD on The relationship between multilingualism and autism: a bidirectional approach to a complex issue with Prof Gibson in 2023.

Blanche completed her PhD with Prof Gibson 

Ana completed her PhD on dialogic teaching for students with conditions within the autism spectrum with Prof Gibson in 2022

Vicky completed her PhD "Play more and play better: why play in early years is important for children's future language, mathematical and mental health development?" with Prof Gibson in 2022.

Following completion of her BA in Education, Psychology and Learning and Primary PGCE at the University of Cambridge, Emily has been a primary school teacher for the last two years. She is completed an MPhil with Prof Gibson in Psychology and Education, exploring late-diagnosed autistic women’s experiences of mainstream secondary school.

Joe completed a thesis on "Minding Our Manners: Investigating The Nature Of Gricean Manner Implicature Using Psychological Priming Techniques" with Prof Gibson in 2024

Sam completed her PhD with Prof Gibson 

Lenka completed her PhD with Prof Gibson 

Draško is a linguist and a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Leeds, currently working on a project investigating quantification of bilingual experience. During his PhD, he worked on bilingualism, autistic-like traits, cognitive skills and metaphor understanding in children under the supervision of Dr Napoleon Katsos and Dr Jenny Gibson. His other areas of interest include code-switching, pragmatic language development, language processing, and language impairment. 

Draško is currently

Rosie completed her PhD on Investigating the modality specific cognitive abilities predictive of arithmetic competence, using a developmental trajectories approach  with Prof Gibson in 2020.

Prior to coming to Cambridge to study for an MPhil and then PhD in Psychology and Education Rosie was a teacher and deputy head of a secondary school. 

Yuhe [pronunciation: Yǔ-Hé/You-Her] is an MPhil Education student (Psychology and Education). Her current research interest lies in students’ mental health and wellbeing, and her MPhil project focuses on risk and protective factors that may influence the mental health and wellbeing of international students enrolled in UK universities. Through her MPhil project, she aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge in the area of mental wellbeing in higher education. Before joining in Cambridge, Yuhe obtained a BSc degree in Psychology at University College London (UCL).

Katie’s main research interests are in multilingualism, mental health and developmental conditions. Her PhD investigated the lived experiences of bilingual children on the autism spectrum and was jointly supervised by Dr Jenny Gibson and Dr Napoleon Katsos as part of the MEITS (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies) project (http://www.meits.org). 

Katie is currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Exeter and teaches on training programmes for mental health practitioners in educational settings.  

Gill's work includes researching the relationship between play and cognitive development - specifically the development of thinking skills like counterfactual-reasoning and executive-functions. Gill's PhD research, supervised by Dr Jenny Gibson, explored theoretical claims that pretend-play and counterfactual reasoning are related cognitive skills. Gill has been awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of York from October 2020 to further her PhD work and investigate the role of genetics on play and cognitive development. Gill is also broadly interested in 'International Development' research that supports child development and learning opportunities for marginalised children. 

Currently, Gill works as a Research Associate with the EdTech Hub University of Cambridge

Zhen’s research interests lie in the interplay between play, emotions, and mental health. She is particularly interested in social play (e.g., parent-child play, peer play) and how it is related to parental and child emotional expression (e.g., display of positive emotions and expression of anger) and mental health (e.g., anxiety and depression). Zhen’s PhD research, supervised by Dr Jenny Gibson, investigated social pretend play and its links to emotional development in 7- to 10-year-old children. 

Zhen is currently working as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the PEDAL Centre at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

Curtis is a researcher looking at neurodiversity in bilingual and monolingual children. His doctoral research examined whether there were any differences in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related behaviour, ADHD symptoms, and executive functions. Working from a transdiagnostic approach he aims to discover whether the cognitive and behavioural profiles of bilingual and EAL (English as an Additional Language) differ from those of monolingual children.

Curtis is currently