Professor Catherine Davies

Profile

• International expert in early education practice and policy, focusing on the impact of socioeconomic background on children’s development and post-pandemic educational recovery. 
• High-profile research-to-practice / policy impact through advisory roles to local, national, and international government, e.g. Leeds City Council, UK Covid-19 Inquiry, Department for Education, the Treasury and No. 10, European Commission, as well as the third sector, e.g. Nesta, National Day Nursery Association, Education Policy Institute.
• Continuous record of leading multi-disciplinary, cross-institution funding bids, securing £5.5M since 2020.
• Outstanding research output via high-impact journal articles, evidence briefings, and policy notes, including 30+ peer-reviewed outputs since 2020 and 50+ presentations in 10 countries since 2010. Google scholar.
• Regular peer reviewer for 20+ international funding councils, journals, and conferences.
• Sustained record of effective Masters and undergraduate teaching, PhD supervision and examining, and personal tutoring.
• External advocacy via membership of national and regional groups, e.g. advisor to the Wellcome Trust 2024-25; N8 Research Culture and Environment committee; Pilot PCE panel member for REF2029.

I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2011, focusing on how children learn to produce and understand names for objects. After a postdoc at the University of Kent, I joined the University of Leeds and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018. I became Professor of Language Development in 2022.

I lead the Leeds Child Development Unit, our child-friendly lab for studying language development.

I am available for postgraduate research supervision. I consider high quality applications in first language development, particularly concerning the development of reference and pragmatics, effects of language input, language and literacy in the early years, or early years education.

I would also like to supervise and collaborate on topics in metascience and research culture, e.g. responsible and innovative research assessment; EDI in research. As the first Dean for Research Culture at the University of Leeds, I lead the University towards a more inclusive, equitable, open, and supportive research culture, influencing a community over 5000 academic and professional services staff to produce world-changing research. I am also a leader in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: recognised for advancing gender equity at national and institutional levels as University of Leeds Woman of Achievement 2021. Athena SWAN steering group member 2021-22.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss collaborations in more detail.  I am always keen to take insights to new audiences. For speaking and consulting engagements, please reach out via c.n.davies@leeds.ac.uk

Responsibilities

• Dean for Research Culture

Research interests

My research interests are in first language development, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. Over the course of my career, I have used a range of methods (experimental; corpus) to investigate pragmatic development, i.e. how children understand and produce meaning beyond vocabulary and grammar.

Since 2020 I have focused on the effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns on child development:

• UKRI Ideas to Address COVID-19 to N. Gonzalez-Gomez (PI), C. Davies, A. Hendry, T. Gliga, M. McGillion. The effects of social distancing policies on children’s language development, sleep and executive functions.

• UKRI Ideas to Address COVID-19 to H. Nash (PI), P. Clarke, C. Davies, M. Horner. The Impact of Covid-19 on Key Learning and Education (ICKLE)

• ESRC Standard Grant to Henry, L. (PI), Botting, N., Moss, R., Davies, C., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hendry, A. Hill, E., McGillion, M., Prior, E., Reimers, S., Shapiro, L. (2024 -2027). Born in Covid Year - Core Lockdown Effects (BICYCLE).

I work with a range of government and practitioner stakeholder groups (e.g. the UK COVID Inquiry, the Department for Education, the Welsh Government, Leeds City Council) in applying research findings to practice and policy. My research-to-practice collaborations are primarily with educational and clinical practitioners. 

I have methodological expertise in lab-based behavioural methods, eye tracking, corpus analyses, randomised controlled trials, and longitudinal studies.

My first major ESRC-funded project (2018–2022) focuses on how young children understand and produce adjectives – a common but challenging area of vocabulary development.

As part of the ESRC-funded project Promoting language development via shared reading (2015–2018), I worked on a randomised controlled trial to promote caregiver-child inference-based dialogue during shared book reading and to establish whether an increase in this type of talk can boost children’s inferencing ability.

• Children's experience, understanding, and use of adjectives across the socioeconomic spectrum
• Exploring psycholinguistic eye tracking methodologies and data analytic techniques
• ManyBabies1: Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference
• Speaker identity in metaphor processing

Qualifications

• PhD: Overinformativeness in Referential Communication
• MPhil English and Applied Linguistics
• BA (Hons) Linguistics and Phonetics

Professional memberships

• Experimental Psychology Society
• International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL)

Student education

undefined

Research groups and institutes

• Linguistics and Phonetics
• Language acquisition
• Language processing
• Language at Leeds
• Leeds Child Development Unit