James Law

• James was a Professor of Speech and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. ECLS

Original qualifications: BA Linguistics 1974; PG Speech and Language Therapy 1981; PhD Social Science City University, London 1993

Employment: After practising as a speech and language therapist in East London I have worked at City University, London, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and now Newcastle University.

Research focus: Child language and language disorders with a particular interest in developmental change and how to detect the effects of interventions against such changes. Much of my work has had a practitioner focus.

Ambitions for SEED: I am interested in whether it is possible to describe the impact of social disadvantage on different aspects of child development (language/behaviour etc) but also in how those factors interact with one another. I would like to see to what extent it is possible to model the effects of interventions in large population studies and to see whether such effects are comparable across different birth cohorts.