Personal Statement
My vision is to use data driven approaches in order to advocate for better outcomes in early child development and dhildren with neurodevelopmental disabilities. I work as a global expert by both WHO and UNICEF on over five different initiatives including interventions for children with disabilities and developmental delay, home based health records in order to support teams in making more informed decisions on research and programmatic evaluation. I support impactful research on the validation and creation of normative values for children’s development through the Global Scales of Early Development which is currently validating a tool on over 8,000 children across 8 countries. I particularly focus on the validation of the "long form" - the direct observational tool and am now focussing on ensuring that we can well validate the tool for identifying children with disabilities in the youngest years to ensure they get the interventions they need in a timely manner.
Having conducted studies with collaborative grants over 12 million in over 10 countries in the world on early child development and disability, I have gained experience and knowledge in ensuring best data collection through the use of electronic databases, standard operating procedures, the use of well-adapted tools and good quality control procedures.
I have a natural talent working across cultures and contexts managing ongoing projects by bringing people and systems together to deliver results as demonstrated by my 23 year history of conducting research across contexts particularly in Africa with over 100 publications. I am driven to ensure that I do this most by capacity strengthening and supporting growth and leadership of the teams and individuals I work with globally.

Research Overview
My group is focussed on improving outcomes for children's development and for children with disabilities in settings of adversity. My major research interest is in the assessment of neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioural outcomes in children in global settings and in understanding how this can be done well, at scale and with meaning. This is particularly vital in a global environment where the focus for child health is focussing away from just looking at child survival, but now to how well children are thriving and what their quality of life is like.
I lead teams in undertaking large field studies in a number of global settings looking at the effect of health and social factors on early child development (malaria in pregnancy, nutrition, prematurity, HIV exposure). My group is also particularly focussed on pursuing the linkages between interventions to support children’s development and behaviour particularly within a systems approach to care.
I created a neurodevelopmental assessment tool, the MDAT, which is being utilised in over 22 countries globally for research and programmatic work – much of this linking early interventions in nutrition, WASH and early stimulation programmes with later outcomes in children (www.mdat.org.uk and MDAT university website.
Our team work closely with international organisations including the World Health Organization on creation of firstly, the Infant and Young Child Developmental Indicators (IYCD) and now the Global Scales of Early Development (GSED).
Future plans for our group will include incorporating ways of better measuring childhood disability in the early years in multiple settings globally and utilising these to understand better the causes of neurodevelopmental disorders in children in diverse settings.We are more recently pursuing work looking at tools and systems for best identifying children with neurodevelopmental disorders and disabilities in low and middle income settings.International Neurodevelopmental Paediatrics Group