

Our team
Meet the team.
Our researchers
Director of the Surrey Baby Lab
Dr Alexandra Grandison
Associate Head of Education for the School of Psychology
Biography
Alexandra is an Associate Professor of Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at the University of Surrey. She is the Director of the Surrey Baby Lab and also the Associate Head of Education for the School of Psychology, overseeing 14 academic programmes across two departments. Since starting her academic career in 2010, she has enjoyed a range of different leadership roles in teaching and research. Her main research interest is language — how it works, how we learn it, and how it might shape the way we see the world. At the Surrey Baby Lab, her team explores these questions by looking at how babies interact with their surroundings before they can talk, how toddlers make sense of the world as they learn language, and how speaking different languages can shape our experiences across the lifespan.

Sienna Black
Research Assistant
Biography
Sienna Black is an undergraduate Psychology student from the University of Bath. For her placement year, she is working as a Research Assistant for Dr. Alexandra Grandison at the Surrey Baby Lab. During this year, she hopes to gain practical research skills and an insight into the research process. She is particularly interested in the influence of colour on cognition and perception and how language influences gender and stereotypes.

William Bartlett
Research Assistant
Biography
William Bartlett is an undergraduate Psychology student at the University of Surrey. Currently he is taking a placement year in which he is working under the supervision of Dr Alexandra Grandison at the Surrey Baby Lab. He is interested in understanding how perception in infancy and at younger ages can influence preferences and thought patterns later in life. During his placement he hopes to improve on his data analysis skills as well as develop a greater understanding of the research process.

Melisa Sahiner
Postgraduate Researcher
Biography
Melisa is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Surrey. After completing her Psychology BSc at Istanbul Kultur University, she found her calling in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Padova. She is interested in understanding the development of numerical cognition. During her MSc, she conducted a study on young adults, and now she is shifting her focus to working with infants and their parents to explore the neural similarities across generations. She is also a member of the Learning Brain Lab at UCL, collaborating with her colleagues to bring more contributions into the field.
Affiliates
Collaborators
- Greville G. Corbett
- Michael Franjieh
- Anna Franklin
- Paul T. Sowden
- Diana Tham
Research assistants
- Mabel Baldry
- Emily Clark
- Christopher Delivett
- Catarina Duarte
- Grace French
- Lily Greene
- Cerys Jones
- Paulina Kapciak
- Irina Mannerak
- Emily Marsh
- Gabriella Sherry
- Rebecca Steedman
- Nina Toleva
- Emily Wilkinson
Postgraduate researchers
- Yousuf Alazmi
- James Alvarez
- Beejal Mehta
- Adam Pedley
- Chloe Taylor
- Lexi Ball
- Imogen Brooks
- Isabella Cordani
- Mafalda Batista Da Costa