Manon Jones is Professor of Psychology and Director of Research in the School of Psychology and Sport Science at Bangor University. Her research is in the cognitive(neuro) science of reading and language, with a particular focus on skilled adult reading, developmental dyslexia, and biliteracy. She is particularly interested in elucidating the cognitive skills that enable some readers to become highly fluent, whereas others never attain similar levels of fluency despite being highly intelligent and articulate. As well as conducting experiments to investigate these issues in her lab, Dr. Jones is the Principal Investigator of the Remote Instruction of Language and Literacy (RILL) project (www.rillresearch.org), a programme designed both to assist primary-aged children in remote learning during the lockdown periods, and to catch up on language and literacy skills in the classroom. 

Gwennant completed her BSc in Psychology with Child and Language Development and MSc in Psychological Research at Bangor University. She began her PhD at the university in 2016 investigating bilingual semantic processing. Using the event-related potentials technique, she examined whether stronger conceptual links in the native language afford less processing effort to achieve intra-sense conceptual mapping than in the non-native language, and whether the bilingual inter-sense mapping includes co-activations of meaning. She used sentence processing throughout in a bid to provide an account of bilingual semantics beyond the lexical level. Upon completing her PhD, she continued with her research interests and is currently coordinating the RILL programme, designed to support children’s language and literacy skills. 

Will came to the lab as a postdoctoral Research Officer in 2023, with a focus on coordinating research projects both on the RILL programme and at the School of Human and Behavioural Sciences mainly in eyetracking and EEG. He completed his BA in Psychology at Bangor (2007), MSc in Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol (2012), and PhD in Neuroscience and Cognition at the Center for Mathematics, Cognition and Complex Systems - UFABC, in Brazil (2016). He previously completed a postdoc in the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Mackenzie University Sao Paulo in Brazil (2020). Will is interested in many aspects of social cognition, including language, specifically how face perception and visual attention guide processes linked to social and linguistic comprehension. 

Catherine completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of the Basque Country focussing on how auditory semantic information can support optimal reading at different stages of reading development and in different languages. She is interested in how broader language skills can be appropriated to compensate for reading difficulties, how bilingualism and differences in orthography influence reading and reading acquisition, and what this means for multilingual education. She is currently working on the Remote Instruction of Language and Literacy (RILL) project as a Research Officer supporting data collection, management and analysis.

Tianjiao Lee is a PhD student in Psychology at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) and Bangor University. Tianjiao is interested in the cognitive and neurocognitive underpinnings of reading, attention, visual and auditory processing, and bilingual language processing.

Simone completed her PhD in the lab in 2022, investigating the different processes underpinning acquisition of novel visual-phonological associations in individuals with developmental dyslexia and typical readers. Simone holds an MSc degree in Clinical Linguistics jointly offered by the Universities of Groningen, Eastern Finland, and Potsdam, and an MA in Applied Linguistics from King’s College London. She has experience with both lab-based and webcam-based eye tracking research, as well as with mouse tracking and electroencephalography (event related potentials). She is now a Lecturer in the School of Human and Behavioural Sciences, as well as the marketing and recruitment lead for the Department of Psychology. 

Ciara joined the Reading Brain lab in 2015 for her Master's dissertation on the impact of orthographic depth on bilingual reading. Following this, she completed her PhD in the lab on the relationship between sound and meaning in silent reading, using a combination of electrophysiology and pupil dilation. Ciara completed her PhD in 2020, and left rainy North Wales for the equally rainy West of Ireland, where she is now a lecturer in Clinical Neuroscience at NUI Galway. 

Ceri Ellis joined the lab in 2012 and completed her thesis How Language, Culture and Emotion shape the mind, using EEG methodology. Her research examined how bilinguals differentially process sentence meaning, depending on their language and cultural affiliations. Ceri is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manchester undertaking research on autism. 

Awel Vaughan-Evans is a senior lecturer, language researcher and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor (College of Human Sciences) at Bangor University. Awel was a PhD student between 2012 – 2015, co-supervised by Prof. Thierry, and her expertise is in bilingual syntactic coactivation.