CNE Overview

Established in 2005, the Centre for Neuroscience in Education was the first of its kind in the world. It is headed by founding Director Professor Usha Goswami, with Dr. Dénes Szücs as Deputy Director, both of whom are cognitive neuroscientists. The Centre for Neuroscience in Education is now part of the Department of Psychology, situated in the School of Biological Sciences, having been moved from its original home in the Faculty of Education in 2010.

Over the past fifteen years, the Centre for Neuroscience in Education has carried out a number of research projects aimed at establishing the basic parameters of brain development in the cognitive skills critical for education. Through an over-arching focus on literacy and numeracy, we aim to understand how the brain functions and changes during development by exploring related skills including phonology, grammar, memory, numerosity and attention. It is by studying variations from typical developmental trajectories that we can identify neural processing differences that characterise learning disorders like dyslexia, dyscalculia and developmental language disorder. Via our discoveries, we aim to develop interventions and remediation tools to support children with these neurodevelopmental disorders in all cultures. 

Our work has been been recognised both domestically and internationally as leading the research field. Centre Director Usha Goswami has been awarded a series of research prizes including the British Psychology Society President’s Award, the Norman Geschwind-Rodin Prize from Sweden and the New York Academy of Sciences Aspen Brain Forum Senior Investigator Prize in Neuroeducation. Deputy Director Dénes Szücs has been a visiting professor at both Stanford and Padua, and has been awarded a James S. McDonnell foundation scholarship for Human Cognition and a United Nations Senior Fellowship in the Science of Learning, which he held at UNESCO in Geneva. Our projects have been sponsored by many organisations including the Botnar Fondation, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), European Research Council (ERC), The Leverhulme Trust, The Nuffield Foundation, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Medical Research Council (MRC), and the Wellcome Trust.