People
Mathias Urban - ECRC Director and Desmond Chair of Early Childhood Education
Mathias works on questions of diversity and equality, social justice, evaluation and professionalism in working with young children, families and communities in diverse socio-cultural contexts.
Bernadette Dwyer - Associate Professor in Literacy Studies
Bernadette is currently engaged in research in the areas of multimodal and digital literacies.
Emma Byrne-MacNamee, Doctoral Researcher. Emma’s research is oriented to discourses on professional identity and professional development of Early Childhood Educators.
Geraldine French - Programme Chair of the Bachelor of Early Childhood Education
Geraldine’s research interests include: interactions between adults and very young children with a particular focus on those at risk of educational inequality; pedagogy; professional practice generally and particularly for babies in early childhood settings.
Diana Gómez Muñoz - Doctoral Researcher
Diana’s research interests include early childhood development, education and care in diverse socio-cultural contexts; policies for early childhood; professional identities and practices in ECEC from an interdisciplinary point of view.
Gillian Lake - Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education and Chair of Postgraduate Studies by Research, FHEA
Gillian has an ongoing research interest in language development, oral language interventions, narrative development, play, evaluation research and emerging literacy.
Grainne McKenna - Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education
Grainne has a particular interest in prevention and early intervention, educational inequality and early teacher-child relationships.
Aoife Merrins, Doctoral Researcher. Aoife’s research is oriented to sociocultural and interactionist views of language acquisition
Tara Concannon-Gibney - Assistant Professor in Literacy
Tara’s research interests include the development of early literacy skills in meaningful contexts, play and literacy, and self-study in higher education
Fiona Giblin - Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education
Fiona’s research interests include young children’s meaning-making, communication and language development, multimodality, creativity, early childhood curriculum and pedagogy.
Jennifer Guevara - Postdoctoral Fellow
Jennifer works on questions of Early Childhood Education and Care policies, systems and workforce, with a particular focus on Latin America.
Sinéad McNally - Assistant Professor in Psychology (Early childhood)
Sinéad’s current research interests include developmental psychology (birth to 8); research methods in early childhood; language development; social cognition; autism spectrum disorder (infancy and early childhood).
Sandra O’Neill - Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education
Sandra’s current research interests include Technology and Mathematics in early childhood education.
Aishling Silke - Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education
Aishing has a special interest in advocacy and stakeholder engagement in government policy process which relates to the early years.
Gloria Turpin - Doctoral Researcher
Gloria works on spiritually intelligent children and spiritual education in the Early Years a Froebelian perspective'.
Niamh Watkins - Assistant Professor Literacy Studies
Niamh’s current research interests include: critical literacy, oral language, writing, vocabulary instruction.
Germán Camilo Zárate Pinto - Doctoral Researcher
Camilo;’s research interests are: early childhood rights and policies; early childhood development(s), education, and care in scenarios of peace building; language, literacy and culture.