Show Menu

Meet Our Team

PEDAL's team members come from a range of backgrounds including psychology, education, medicine, and speech and language therapy. We're linked together by our drive to discover how we can use play to spark change in families, schools, and communities.

PEDAL Staff

Sara Baker

Sara is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education.

Jenny Gibson

Jenny is Professor of Neurodiversity and Developmental Psychology at the Faculty of Education, and co-director of PEDAL.

Paul Ramchandani

Paul is LEGO Professor of Play in Education, Development and Learning, and the Director of the PEDAL Centre.

Julia Birchenough

Julia is a Research Associate, currently working with Prof Sara Baker as part of the Play in Schools team.

Nicole Louise Creasey

Nicole is a Research Associate at PEDAL.

Joy Davis

Joy supports the work of PEDAL in her role as Communications Coordinator.

Emily Goodacre

Emily is a Research Associate at PEDAL.

Soizic Le Courtois

Soizic Le Courtois is a Research Associate on the Early Years Library project.

Christine O'Farrelly

Christine is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Associate at PEDAL.

Emma Pritchard-Rowe

Emma is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Education.

Eloise Stevens

Eloise is a Research Associate and Child Therapist.

PEDAL Students

Abbas AlAbbas

Abbas is a first-year PhD student with PEDAL.

María Alejandra Álvarez Taborda

Alejandra is a first year PhD student at PEDAL, supervised by Professor Jenny Gibson and funded by The Cambridge Trust.

Natalie Kirby

Tilly is a final year PhD student researching the ways play and booksharing can support families in children's earliest years.

Debbie Kwan

Debbie is a second year PhD student exploring ways to promote and measure empathy. Her work involves adapting and implementing an intervention suitable for use in a junior school classroom, as well as developing a play-based measure of cognitive empathy.

Zijia Li

Zijia is a first year PhD student at PEDAL exploring children’s pretend play and their social cognitive development.

Stuart Macalpine

Stuart is a part-time doctoral student, researching the conceptualisation of learning goals in policy.

Carolyn Mazzei

Carolyn is a PhD student examining play and classroom talk, and how these are related to children's cognitive development.

Paulina Pérez-Duarte Mendiola

Paulina is a final year PhD student exploring how children behave before, during and after they interact with Hospital Play Specialists and what children think of these interactions.

Rebecca Reid

Rebecca is a first-year PhD student at PEDAL, researching play and adolescence in the context of school exclusions.

Rebecca Sands

Rebecca is a first year PhD student interested in children's development of critical thinking skills through the English primary curriculum. 

Kateryna Tyzhuk

Kate is a second year PhD student in PEDAL and the MRC Epidemiology Unit, investigating young children's risky play within early childhood educational settings in the UK.

Alejandra Vijil Morin

Alejandra is a first year PhD student researching play in contexts of emergencies.

Zhiyu Zhao

Zhiyu is a second year PhD student with PEDAL.

PEDAL Associates & Affiliates

Stephen Bayley

Stephen is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with PEDAL and an Associate Member of the REAL Centre, University of Cambridge.

Kelsey Graber

Kelsey is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with PEDAL. whose work focuses on the role of play in children's health and wellbeing.

Dave Neale

Dave is an affiliate of PEDAL and teaches the psychology of play.

Laura Oxley

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with PEDAL.

PEDAL PhD Alumni

Sydney Conroy

Sydney's doctoral research examined play therapists' experiences and perceptions of children's wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic, collective trauma, and child-centred play therapy.

Sabilah Eboo Alwani

Sabilah's multi-method research focused on parent support for early learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chika Ezeugwu

Chika's scientific interests focused on integrating neuroscience, cognition, child development, and education to improve educational practice and the experience of children from a low-income context.

Dina Fajardo-Tovar

Dina is a 3rd year PhD student exploring Mexican teachers' perspectives on using playful learning in their practice, particularly in urban and rural preschools.

Morgan Healy

Morgan explored how play-based parent interventions and home visiting programs could promote a range of child outcomes including executive function and self-regulation.

Krishna Kulkarni

Krishna's research examined parent-child playfulness, and its importance in child outcomes.

Stephanie Nowack

Stephanie's PhD project looked at a participatory research approach to understanding autistic children’s experience of playful interventions in South Africa.

Domnick Okullo

Domnick's doctoral research focused on teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of the use of play-based learning in Kenya.

Yanwen Wu

Yanwen is a 2nd year PhD student, investigating the relationship between pretend play and counterfactual reasoning from a temporal perspective.

Vicky Yiran Zhao

Vicky's doctoral research project looks at the relationship between communication disorders and psychosocial adversities.

Privacy Overview
PEDAL

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer generated when you visit a website and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These essential cookies do things like: remembering the notifications you've seen so we do not show them to you again or your progress through a form. They always need to be on.

3rd Party Cookies

We use a set of third party tools to provide information of how our users engage with our website so that we can improve the experience of the website for our users. For example, we collect information about which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users. We also use third-party cookies to help with performance.