Professor Susan Golombok

Director at Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge

Share
Director of the Centre for Family Research, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge

Susan Golombok is the Director of the Centre for Family Research. After graduating from the University of Glasgow, she moved to the London University Institute of Education where she took an MSc in Child Development. The first 10 years of her working life were spent at the Institute of Psychiatry. While employed here she carried out her Ph.D. research on children in lesbian mother families in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In 1987 she moved to the Department of Psychology at City University, London, first as a lecturer and later as a Reader and then Professor. She established the Family and Child Psychology Research Centre there in 1989 to carry out research on parenting and child development in new family forms, and was Director from 1989 until January 2006, when she moved to the University of Cambridge to become Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research.

Her research focuses on new family forms with an emphasis on parent-child relationships and children’s social, emotional and gender development in lesbian mother families, single mother families and families with children conceived by assisted reproduction.

Professor Golombok is a Trustee both of the Laura Ashley Foundation and of One plus One. She has been involved in policy issues as a member of the government Surrogacy Review Committee and has advised the Department of Health on issues regarding assisted reproduction and lesbian mother families. She has sat on advisory committees relating to research projects conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Sainsbury Trust, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood, and Procter and Gamble Pharmaceuticals.