

Our team
Meet the team.
Our researchers

Director of the Surrey Baby Lab
Dr Alexandra Grandison
Senior Lecturer
Biography
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.

Emily Clark
Research Assistant
Biography
Emily Clark is an Undergraduate Psychology student at the University of Surrey, currently on a placement year with the Surrey Baby Lab. Under supervision of Dr Alexandra Grandison. She believes this placement is an incredible opportunity to test and grow her current skills and knowledge, as well as prepare her for final year. With this placement she hopes to gain practical experience in collecting data, but also develop other skills like data analysis, writing, and an insight into research. For example, understanding of the influence of language on perception, namely influence on stereotypes.

Catarina Duarte
Research Assistant
Biography
Catarina is a Psychology BSc (Hons) student at the University of Surrey. This year for her placement, she will work as a Research Assistant at the Surrey Baby Lab. During this time, she hopes to gain practical experience in developing experiments and collecting data in the developmental and cognitive research areas. She is particularly keen on understanding how language contributes to gender and stereotypes.

Mafalda Batista Da Costa
Postgraduate Researcher
Biography
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.
Affilaites
Collaborators
- Greville G. Corbett
- Michael Franjieh
- Anna Franklin
- Paul T. Sowden
- Diana Tham
Research assistants
- Christopher Delivett
- Catarina Duarte
- Grace French
- Cerys Jones
- Paulina Kapciak
- Rebecca Steedman
- Gabriella Sherry
- Emily Wilkinson
- Nina Toleva
- Lily Greene
- Irina Mannerak
Postgraduate researchers
- Yousuf Alazmi
- James Alvarez
- Beejal Mehta
- Adam Pedley
- Chloe Taylor
- Lexi Ball
- Imogen Brooks
- Isabella Cordani