Professor Pasco Fearon

Pasco Fearon is Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research in the Department of Psychology. He specialises in understanding the early-in-life determinants of healthy child development. His work focuses particularly on the role of parent-child relationships, including attachment and caregiving, and the interactions between social and genetic processes in early development. He leads the Children of the 2020s birth cohort study in England, and co-directs the UK-wide Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study. He is also a Clinical Psychologist and conducts extensive intervention research, predominantly with parents and young children, in both the UK and in low- and middle-income countries, leveraging the science of early child development to promote children’s outcomes. He works closely with government departments and the NHS to support policy on children’s development and mental health, and is a longstanding member of the children’s mental health charity the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. He is President of the Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies, Deputy Editor in Chief of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and adjunct faculty member of the Child Study Center at Yale and the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London.