Professor Mark Mon-Williams

Profile

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

He is Deputy Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council and Chair of the Ministry of Justice’s ‘preventative analytics’ academic taskforce.

MMW is Director of the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, Impact Director for Medicine and Health at Leeds, Executive Member of the Born in Bradford (BiB) longitudinal birth cohort programme, Child Health Outcome Research At Leeds (CHORAL), and the N8’s Child of The North partnership.

He is an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and leads the BiB Centre of Applied Education Research and NHS Yorkshire Applied Research Collaboration ‘Data Analytics, AI and Visualisation’ group.

His research is funded by UKRI councils including the ESRC (e.g., Vulnerabilities and Policing Futures centre). He led the ‘Healthy Learning’ theme within the UK’s ‘ActEarly’ Prevention Research Programme and leads a team investigating the interactions between environmental and genetic risk factors for physical and mental health multimorbidity within the Medical Research Council LINC programme.

MMW 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 measure the impact on children’s health).

Responsibilities

• Director Centre for Applied Education Research
• Born in Bradford academic lead
• 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

Professional memberships

• FRCPCH