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Director and Professor of Family Research, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge
Director, Children of the 2020s Birth Cohort Study
Co-Director, Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study, ESRC
Pasco Fearon is a developmental and clinical psychologist doing world-leading research on child development and children’s mental health. He is Director of the Children of the 2020s Birth Cohort Study commissioned by the Department for Education and co-Director of the ESRC’s Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study. He did his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University and PhD at UCL, and subsequently trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Wales, Bangor. He was joint-director of UCL’s Clinical Psychology Course for 10 years, and has worked at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families continuously since 1995.
His work focuses on the caregiving influences on child development, and includes longitudinal observational studies, neuroscientific investigations and controlled trials of caregiving interventions, all in the service of understanding and promoting positive child development and children’s mental health and wellbeing. He works internationally, with key collaborations in the USA, Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Lebanon.
He is also closely involved in children’s mental health policy, through his work at the Anna Freud Centre and as a trustee of the charity Foundation Years Information Research. He was a member of the NICE guideline group on attachment and a member of the groups that developed the Children’s Wellbeing Practitioners programme and the CYP IAPT National Zero-Fives training curriculum, as well as a number of other national initiatives for children.