Professor Mark Mon-Williams (MMW) holds a Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leeds, and is Professor of Psychology at the Bradford Institute of Health Research, and Professor of Paediatric Vision at The Norwegian Centre for Vision. He is also a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s National data analytics centre). MMW held post-doctoral fellowships at the Universities of Edinburgh and Queensland before taking up his first faculty position at the University of St Andrews in 1999. In 2002 he moved to the University of Aberdeen where his laboratories received funding from a large number of national and international grant awarding bodies. He was appointed to a personal Chair at the University of Leeds in January 2009 and was Head of the School of Psychology from 2011-2014. 25 years ago, MMW made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the sensorimotor impact of Virtual Reality (work that was headline news around the world). He is now leading the Centre for Immersive Technologies at the University of Leeds– with Immersive Technologies being a major research priority for the University. MMW is also leading the creation of a Centre of Applied Education Research (a partnership between the Universities of Leeds and Bradford together with the Department for Education, the Education Endowment Foundation, and the Bradford Local Authority) – a multidisciplinary Centre based at the Bradford Royal Infirmary. MMW sits within a research group that use their fundamental scientific contributions to address applied issues within surgery, rehabilitation and childhood development and he has responsibility for ensuring societal impact arises from research conducted within the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Medicine and Health. MMW leads the NHS CLAHRC committee responsible for ‘Identifying and Supporting Children with Difficulties’, and is an executive member of the Born in Bradford project (a longitudinal cohort study following the lifelong development of 13,500+ children). His research is funded by a number of organisations including the EPSRC, EEF, MRC and ESRC. MMW is committed to improving the health and education of children. He is a Founder Member of the Priestley Academy Trust (a multiple academy trust that includes the first school known to provide free meals to children), and sits on the Bradford Opportunity Area partnership board.
