Markéta  Caravolas is an Reader/Associate Professor in Psychology at Bangor University, Wales, UK.  She completed her doctorate in Psychology at McGill University in 1996 after spending the first part of her career as a teacher and clinician working with children with specific disorders of learning in the bilingual setting of Montreal.  Since 1997, she has undertaken an academic career in the United Kingdom where, in addition, she directed the Miles Dyslexia Centre at Bangor University from 2008 to 2014.  Her research interests are in literacy development and its disorders and her scholarship spans theory and practice.  She focuses on developmental psycholinguistics and early literacy, phonological and spelling development in the context of alphabetic literacy, and a special feature of her work is on cross-linguistic investigations of language-general and language-specific factors in reading and spelling development in typical and dyslexic populations.  She has published extensively on these topics. She has also created comprehensive batteries for the assessment and diagnosis of reading and spelling difficulties in the Czech and Slovak languages, and is working with colleagues on a large multi-language assessment battery of early literacy (MABEL), which includes parallel literacy-related measures in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Polish and Welsh.

My main research interests are in literacy development in typical populations and in groups with Specific Learning Difficulties, especially dyslexia. Much of my work includes longitudinal and cross-linguistic designs in monolingual and bilingual learners. A number of my research projects have led to the development of standarised test batteries for the assessment of children's literacy skills in languages including English, Czech, Slovak, Spanish and Welsh.

I work with researchers in the UK as well as in a number of countries in Europe and North America, and have headed up a wide variety of externally-funded, international projects pertaining to literacy development and its disorders.

Dr Caravolas supervises undergraduate and Masters students on projects in the areas of typical and atypical literacy development, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic studies.

She is currently supervising PhD candidate, Catrin Leah Hadden, as first supervisor.

She teaches a specialist 3rd-year module: Disorders of Literacy, and contributes to 1st-year module: Language and Its Disorders,  and at the Masters level: Bilingualism: Research and Methods.

Self-funded (inc. agency-funded) projects: Dr. Caravolas welcomes informal enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in Literacy and Literacy Disorders, especially those that are interested in cross-linguistic and/or bilingual literacy development. She would also welcome students interested in research relevant to neurodevelopmental disorders that affect aspects of literacy, including dyslexia, developmental language delay, developmental co-ordination disorder.