Catalina Suarez Rivera
Catalina is a Reader of Child Psychology at ISEY where she advances empirical research on the importance of early child and caregiver social interactions for the development of language and cognition. Catalina’s research has been published in top-quality journals. Three of her papers received awards to recognise the quality of the work and contribution to the field. Catalina enjoys attending national and international conferences on child development to present her work. She also serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for research journals, including Infancy, Developmental Psychology, Developmental Science, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. She maintains active research collaborations with University College London and New York University and supervises MSc and PhD students to turn their dissertations and projects into publishable outputs.
Catalina’s research focuses on the real-time dynamics of parent–infant interactions and how these shape the development of language, attention, and self-regulation across the first years of life. Using naturalistic observations and advanced statistical methods that capture the temporal structure of events across modalities, she examines how moment-to-moment social, cultural, and environmental contexts influence infant learning and developmental trajectories.
Before joining ISEY, Catalina worked as a Lecturer at University College London. She completed her post-doctoral training with Catherine Tamis-LeMonda at New York University. Catalina obtained her Ph.D. in Psychology from Indiana University in 2019 with Linda Smith and Chen Yu, where she investigated joint attention in infancy, including its sensorimotor foundations and long-term developmental consequences. During her doctoral training, she also obtained a Master of Science in Applied Statistics, which informs her methodological approach to studying complex behavioural data.
