Our team

Alexandra is a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, the Director of the Surrey Baby Lab and the lead for the School of Psychology’s DevELOP (Development, Education, Learning, and Outreach in Psychology) research group. She started her career as an academic in 2010 and loves her job. She enjoys teaching and supporting students and conducting fascinating research. Her main research focus is language, which is a fundamental part of what makes us human. She is particularly interested in whether the language we speak shapes the way we think about and understand our world. The work that we do at the Surrey Baby Lab explores this idea by investigating how babies interact with their environment before they have language, the impact of language learning during childhood, and the implications of speaking different languages across the lifespan.

Mafalda is a postgraduate research and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Surrey. She completed her Psychology BSc (Hons) at the University of Kent, and her MSc in Developmental Psychology at the University of Surrey. She is a member of DevELOP and SEER research groups, as well as the new Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Equality Research Group (PIER). Her PhD aims to gain insight into how individuals, specifically children, interpret and understand the pronoun “they” and whether this may have an impact on gender-stereotypes in education.