Georgia Z. Niolaki

Georgia Z. Niolaki, University of Birmingham (previously at Bath Spa University)

E-mail: g.z.niolaki@bham.ac.uk

Dr. Georgia Niolaki is an Assistant Professor in Neurodiversity at the University of Birmingham and a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Education, University of London. She previously served as the Programme Leader for the MA in Dyslexia at Bath Spa University.

Currently, Dr. Niolaki is a Professional Member of the British Psychological Society, the Experimental Psychological Society, and the British Dyslexia Association, holding AMBDA and AMBDA FE/HE accreditation. She also serves as a Trustee of the British Dyslexia Association.

Dr. Niolaki began her career working with children in primary education, specializing in assessing and supporting children with special needs. Since 2011, she has been teaching in Higher Education and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Her research has been widely recognized, with numerous publications in national and international journals. She has also presented her work at leading conferences. As the Principal Investigator on educational and literacy research projects, she has secured funding from prestigious organizations such as the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants, The British Academy, HEQR Seed Funding (Bath Spa University), UKRI, and Seed Corn Funding (University of Birmingham).

Dr. Niolaki’s mission is to support individuals struggling with literacy and to contribute to creating a more inclusive world for everyone.

Recent publications

Niolaki, G. Z., Papadimitriou, V., Terzopoulos, A. R., & Masterson, J. (2024). Greek-spelling predictors; an investigation of literacy-and cognitive-related factors. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1-16.

Georgia Niolaki, Kate Carr-Fanning, & Aris Terzopoulos (2023). Psychology and Educational Inclusion: Identifying and supporting learners with SEN, McGraw Hill Open University Press

Niolaki, G., Negoita, A., Vousden, J., Terzopoulos, A., and Masterson, J. (2023). What spelling errors can tell us about the development of processes involved in children’s spelling. Frontiers in Psychology.https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1178427

Niolaki, G., Vousden, J., Taylor L., Terzopoulos, A., Debney, L., Shepherd, D-L. and Masterson, J. (2022). Spelling predictors in a large cross-sectional study investigating the role of phonological ability and rapid naming. Learning & Instruction https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2022.101635

Spruhan, H., Niolaki, G., Vousden, J., Terzopoulos, A., & Masterson, J. (2022). Spelling performance of 6-and 8-year-old Irish children; Is it< analice> or <analyze>?. The Journal of Educational Research, 115(1), 87-97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2022.2031844

Marku, B., Niolaki, G., Terzopoulos A.R, Wood, C., (2022). Eastern European Parents’ Experiences of Parenting a Child with SEN in London. Educational Psychology in Practice (IF: 0.8)https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2022.2100320

Role in GRADIENCE: Dr. Terzopoulos and Dr. Niolaki have been integral members of the team that developed HelexKids (Terzopoulos, Duncan, Wilson, Niolaki, Masterson 2016, https://www.helexkids.org), a word frequency database derived from Greek and Cypriot school books spanning the first to the sixth grade of primary education. This database serves as a valuable resource for psycholinguistic experimental studies and educational practitioners seeking educational insights.

Their expertise extends to the Part-of-Speech (PoS) annotation of HelexKids. Additionally, they actively contribute to the exploring lexicostatistical word frequencies based on HelexKids. Furthermore, both researchers play a key role in the production of published papers, ensuring the dissemination of the project’s findings to the academic community.