The Team
We are a collaborative community of researchers studying how infants adapt, explore, and learn in complex everyday environments. Our work brings together ecological methods, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computational approaches.
Principal Investigator
Dr Dean D'Souza
Dean is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. His research focuses on how infants adapt to the diverse environments in which they grow, learn, and develop. Through his fellowship, he is developing ecological and interactionist methods that combine measures of infants’ everyday environments with naturalistic observation, experimental data, and computational modelling. His work aims to understand development as an unfolding process of adaptation, in which brain, body, behaviour, and environment are continuously coupled and mutually shaping over time.
Collaborator
Dr Hana D'Souza
Hana is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. She leads the Cardiff Babylab and is also the Deputy Director of the Cardiff University Centre for Human Developmental Science (CUCHDS).
New Postdoctoral Research Associate (coming!)
New Postdoc
Bio...
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dr Niveen Omar
Niveen studies how children learn from complex input, including word learning and the role of sleep in memory consolidation. In the ELAN Lab, she helps design and implement tasks examining infant–child interaction, exploration, and information-gathering. Her work focuses on how infants and children detect meaningful structure in their environments, and how these processes support learning and development over time.
PhD student
Marco Cangini
Marco received his MSc in Language Sciences at University College London and is currently undertaking a PhD at Cardiff University. His current research at the ELAN Lab aims to advance our understanding of infant adaptations to bilingual environments. He is particularly interested in measuring the complexity of infants’ natural language environment and assessing its impact on early development, by combining multilevel naturalistic and experimental data.
Research Assistant & PhD Student
Shreya Jana
Shreya is currently running our large-scale HOME Bilingual project. She was drawn to this project due to her own multilingual background and a keen interest in developmental psychology. She enjoys working with children and is presently setting up the study protocol.
Collaborator
Dr Fintan Nagle
Fintan is a cognitive and vision scientist at Imperial College London, with extensive experience with software engineering and machine learning. He studied on the excellent UCL CoMPLEX MRes PhD programme, which allowed him to conduct four bioinformatics lab rotations followed by a three-year PhD. His doctoral work investigated, for the first time, the mechanisms of temporal visual search on dynamic scenes. Fintan is helping the ELAN lab to measure the complexity of the infants' everyday visual experiences.
Research Assistant
Niamh Halligan
"I studied Psychology at Cardiff University, where I developed a strong interest in developmental psychology, which led me to complete a placement year at CUCHDS during my undergraduate degree. My past experiences have continued to shape my passion for developmental psychology and my love of working with children and families. Due to my own bilingual background and experience attending a Welsh-medium school, I became interested in the ELAN lab and its research into bilingualism. I am particularly interested in how bilingual environments shape children’s development, particularly its’ influence on cognitive skills beyond language acquisition, such as attention."
Intern Placement Student
Alexandria Dolbear
Alexandria is a third year psychology undergraduate student at Cardiff University, undertaking her placement at ELAN Lab. She is interested in developmental psychology, with a particular fascination at how infants develop their language abilities and how adaptable they are. Her responsibilities include assisting with participant recruitment, data collection and processing.
Intern Placement Student
Alice Jewell
Alice is a third-year psychology student at Cardiff University, undertaking her placement in the ELAN lab. Her interests lie in developmental psychology, especially language acquisition. She was drawn to the project as her own bilingual background has sparked a particular interest in how bilingual environments shape development. Her responsibilities include assisting with participant recruitment, data collection, and processing.
Honorary Scientist
Libby
Libby is an ‘honorary scientist’ at the ELAN lab. She visited us years ago with her brother to help with our research. Libby is currently working on a school project on scientists and sent us this picture!
Past Members
Erasmus Trainee
Stefania Cangemi
Stefania was a postgraduate student at the University of Verona in Italy. In collaboration with Hana D'Souza at the University of Cambridge, Stefania worked on observational data we collected from toddlers with Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and Williams syndrome. Our aim was to understand more about how toddlers with neurodevelopmental disorders and their parents interact in naturalistic settings.
BSc Placement Student
Susie Mayer
Susie was a third-year BSc psychology undergraduate at Cardiff University undertaking her placement in the ELAN lab. Her previous experiences working with children deepened her understanding of child behaviour, and she was eager to apply this knowledge in a psychological research setting. Her bilingualism, love for working with children, and strong passion for developmental psychology sparked her interest in this research placement.
BSc Placement Student
Harrison Wilson
Harrison was a psychology undergraduate placement student from Cardiff University. He is particularly interested in language acquisition and the remarkable ability infants have to adapt to their environment. He was drawn to the project due to its exciting use of cutting-edge research practices. His responsibilities included assisting with participant recruitment, data collection and processing, and managing social media and outreach communications.
MSc Placement Student
Pauline Hegner
Pauline was an MSc Psychology placement student from Cardiff University. Fully trained as an Occupational Therapist in Germany, her work experience with children with severe disabilities and autism sparked her curiosity to explore the neurocognitive foundations underpinning common therapy approaches. Due to her keen interest in perception and speaking three languages herself, she was particularly intrigued to understand how infants combine information from different sensory channels when developing language.
Collaborator
Dr Dan Brady
Dan is a Research Software Engineer in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. He has experience of writing research software and analysis pipelines using R, Python, and Julia, and has been developing scripts for one of our projects. He is also a keen advocate of open and reproducible research practices.
Research Assistant
Isabel Quiroz
Isabel collected data for our first big bilingual infants project!
Intern
Julia Janoschka
"I am a Psychology student from Germany and determined by my curiosity and passion for Psychology to be part of a project outside my comfort zone. Doing my Bachelor's degree in Psychology provides me an expanded base of knowledge in various fields of this science, and most important for this project: knowledge in Developmental and Cognitive Psychology."
Research Volunteer
Galia Palmer
Galia was an international undergraduate psychology student at City, University of London. Originally from Florida, USA, she is especially interested in the interaction between neuroscience and human behavior. Galia is also an event, portrait, and family photographer.
Alumni
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