Dr. Hilary Leevers

leevers@axon.rutgers.edu
 

Dr. Hilary Leevers works as a Development Research Consultant on specific projects with the Infancy Studies Laboratory, having left her position of Research Associate at the Laboratory in 2001. Dr. Leevers received her bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, UK specializing in Experimental Psychology. After graduating, she stayed on for a year working as a research assistant with Dr. Usha Goswami. This work included the assessment of literacy and reasoning abilities of 3- to 9-year-olds. Pursuing her growing interest in child development, Dr. Leevers earned her D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology and Child Development at Oxford University, UK, under the supervision of Professor Paul Harris. Her experimental work examined young children's syllogistic reasoning skills with particular reference to the impact of the imagination. Dr. Leevers also looked at the use of the imagination in children's drawings. She worked with preschool children, children with autism, and children with learning disabilities. Dr. Leevers joined the Infancy Studies Laboratory in 1997 as a post-doctoral research coordinator. Her research examined the predictive value of early perceptual-cognitive abilities for later cognitive and language development. She had primary responsibility for following a group of very low birthweight, premature infants. This research examined the relationship between perinatal brain injury, often from intraventricular hemorrhage, and infant information processing, with the aim of identifying factors predictive of later cognitive and linguistic development. Early in 1998, Dr. Leevers became involved in setting up the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research and the development of an early assessment battery designed to test a range of cognitive and receptive language skills in children with limited motor and verbal responses. The target group of this work was children with Holoprosencephaly (HPE). She continues to focus her work in this area and is conducting a Questionnaire study of cognitive, social, & language development in children with holoprosencephaly.

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