Elpis Pavlidou
Elpis Pavlidou is a Lecturer at the University of York. She held a 3-year Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship (European Commision), which gave birth to the I-Le.A.R.N project. For the first 2 years of the fellowship, Elpis worked with Prof Ken Pugh at Haskins Laboratories (Yale University) where the behavioral and neuroimaging data collection took place. Upon return to Edinburgh, Elpis worked with Dr Jo Williams on translating the obtained data into an educational computer game.
Elpis is interested in typical and atypical reading. Her work, so far, focuses on implicit learning in very young good and poor readers with the goal of understanding how this process is used, and the brain circuits that support it. Implicit learning is the process that allows us to acquire the structural regularities of our environment in an unsupervised and undirected fashion. Implicit learning facilitates skilled performance and therefore, it may prove to be a key player in understanding reading and reading disorders. Elpis uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods in an attempt to develop brain-based models of implicit learning.
Joanne Williams
Jo Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh. She has a range of research interests in developmental psychology including: cognitive development and concepts of biology and health; and atypical development (e.g. autism and developmental dyslexia). Her research has been funded by a range of organisations including the UK Government, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.
Her current research grants focus on children's interactions with animals and the implications for children's mental health and animal welfare; and developmental dyslexia. In addition to her research activities, Jo Williams holds a number of administrative roles within the University of Edinburgh including Interim Director of the MSc in Children and Young People's Mental Health and Psychological Practice and Director of the School of Health in Social Science Postgraduate Research Degrees (PhD and MSc by Research). Her teaching and research supervision focuses on developmental psychology. For more information on Jo and relevant publications visit her personal page.
Kenneth Pugh
Ken Pugh is the President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale University and University of Connecticut affiliated inter-disciplinary institute, dedicated to the investigation of the biological bases of language. He also holds academic appointments as a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University. Ken also directs the Yale Reading Center. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the International Dyslexia Association, a corresponding member of the Rodin Remediation Academy in Stockholm, and served for four years as a Member of the Language and Communications Study Section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is currently serving as a member of the “Committee on the Learning Sciences: Foundations and Applications to Adolescent and Adult Literacy” at the National Research Council of the National Academies.
His seminal work falls primarily in two broad domains: cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. A fundamental interest for him and his team continues to be research into the neurobiology of typical and atypical language and reading development in children. For more information on Ken and relevant publications visit his personal page.
