Annette Karmiloff-Smith is Professor and Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the Institute of Child Health in London where she runs a research team looking into infant and child development. She has a "Doctorat en Psychologie Génétique et Expérimentale" from the University of Geneva, where she studied with the famous Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. She has been elected a Member of the Academia Europeaea, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She has 20 years experience of research into various aspects of infant and child development, both normal and abnormal, in particular with respect to language acquisition, face processing, drawing, writing, and problem solving.

Prof. Karmiloff-Smith has been invited to lecture throughout the world on her work and has appeared in numerous radio and television programmes such as BBC Television Q.E.D., Good Morning, GMTV, Open University, Radio 4's Medecine Now and Science Now, World BBC Science in Action, Millenium Babies, Swiss and French radio. She was the scientific consultant on the Emmy-award winning TV series, Baby It's You, for which she wrote the accompanying best seller (No.1 on the Evening Standard Non-Fiction list). A second book for the general public, Everthing your baby would ask if only he or she could speak (Cassell/Ward Lock, 1998 and NewYork: Golden Books.1999) co-authored with her daughter, Kyra Karmiloff, was No.2 on the American List of Best Parenting Books. She has just published, again with her daughter, "Pathways to Language: From foetus to adolescent" with Harvard University Press. She is the author of 7 books and of some 200 chapters and articles in scientific journals.

She has two grown-up daughters and six grandchildren under the age of six.

* Picture from Dumbleton Photography, Cambridge, UK