Professor Mark Mon-Williams

Profile

Professor Mark Mon-Williams (MMW) holds a Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leeds, and is Professor of Psychology at the Bradford Institute of Health Research, and Professor of Paediatric Vision at The Norwegian Centre for Vision. He is also a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s National data analytics centre).

MMW held post-doctoral fellowships at the Universities of Edinburgh and Queensland before taking up his first faculty position at the University of St Andrews in 1999. In 2002 he moved to the University of Aberdeen where his laboratories received funding from a large number of national and international grant awarding bodies. He was appointed to a personal Chair at the University of Leeds in January 2009 and was Head of the School of Psychology from 2011-2014.

25 years ago, MMW made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the sensorimotor impact of Virtual Reality (work that was headline news around the world). He is now leading the Centre for Immersive Technologies at the University of Leeds– with Immersive Technologies being a major research priority for the University.

MMW is also leading the creation of a Centre of Applied Education Research (a partnership between the Universities of Leeds and Bradford together with the Department for Education, the Education Endowment Foundation, and the Bradford Local Authority) – a multidisciplinary Centre based at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.

MMW sits within a research group that use their fundamental scientific contributions to address applied issues within surgery, rehabilitation and childhood development and he has responsibility for ensuring societal impact arises from research conducted within the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Medicine and Health.

MMW leads the NHS CLAHRC committee responsible for ‘Identifying and Supporting Children with Difficulties’, and is an executive member of the Born in Bradford project (a longitudinal cohort study following the lifelong development of 13,500+ children). His research is funded by a number of organisations including the EPSRC, EEF, MRC and ESRC.

MMW is committed to improving the health and education of children. He is a Founder Member of the Priestley Academy Trust (a multiple academy trust that includes the first school known to provide free meals to children), and sits on the Bradford Opportunity Area partnership board.

Responsibilities

• Director Centre for Immersive Technologies
• Director Centre for Applied Education Research
• REF Impact Lead, Faculty Medicine and Health

Research interests

The 'Born in Bradford' study aims to improve the health and education of people living in Bradford (the 6th largest English city, population 293,717). The BiB longitudinal cohort consists of ~13,500+ children and we are capturing all of the routine health, social care and educational data available for these children, and using these data to implement interventions to help children.

The routine data collection is supplemented by detailed investigations of the mother and child's physical health and cognitive function. The mother and child's physical health was tracked throughout pregnancy, birth and the early years to identify factors that impact on a child's outcomes. Our cognitive assessments include rich measures of the child's sensorimotor abilities and offline cognitive function (e.g. working memory and executive function abilities). The detailed cognitive investigations are conducted in discrete 'sweeps', with the first sweep taking place when the children started school (4 to 5 years of age) and the second (current) sweep capturing the children when they enter the English primary school Year 4 (8 to 9 years of age).

Qualifications

• PhD