SERNS board

Dr Helen Pote’s work is relevant for mental health in primary and secondary schools, including research on cognitive biases in adolescent thinking and its relationship to mental health, and adolescent assessment of family functioning and how this links to mental wellbeing. Dr Pote has worked on a number of projects with schools, exploring children's mental health, stigma and perceptions of mental health problems. She has recently focused on mental health awareness in teachers and developed an app to support teachers understanding and screening of mental health in schools.

Dr Jessie Ricketts looks at reading and oral language development and the connections between the two, working with primary and secondary school children with and without special educational needs. Dr Ricketts is particularly interested in the importance of reading for learning across the curriculum. She is currently working on a large longitudinal project investigating reading and vocabulary development in secondary school.

Dr Catherine Sebastian is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Royal Holloway where she directs the Emotion, Development & Brain Lab. Catherine’s research focuses on the development of emotional processing and regulation in typical adolescence and in adolescents with conduct problems. She uses methods from both developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how brain development and behaviour interact. Partnerships with schools are an integral part of Catherine’s research and so she is very excited to be part of SERNS.

Dr Dawn Watling looks at how children navigate through the social world, including factors that may influence their behaviour and the implications for their relationships. One particular area is social anxiety disorder and how children and adolescents with this disorder process emotions and react to social situations, and how this influences their interactions with others. 

Professor Kathy Rastle is interested in language development from an interdisciplinary perspective. This includes work on phonics training in the initial stages of learning to read and how it can aid access to meaning; perspectives from neuroscience on continued reading development in adolescence; and the importance of sleep behaviour for successful learning.