Dr Helen Spicer-Cain

Overview

Helen is a Senior lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy and also works part-time as an independent speech and language therapist. She mostly works with preschool and early school-age autistic children, but also has interests in other speech, language and communication needs and has worked in mainstream and specialist schools during her career. Her academic interests are mostly in the areas of language and communication development, dynamic assessment, receptive language and autism.

Helen completed her PhD thesis at City, University of London in May 2019. Her research followed a cohort of children with older siblings who have SLCN, comparing their communication skills in infancy with those of control children. A subset of the children were seen for longitudinal follow-up at the age of 2-3 to investigate predictors of children's communication skills at preschool age. Particularly, this analysis focused on the predictive value of novel dynamic assessment measures taken in infancy. Helen then followed up this work with a grant from the Heather van der Lely Foundation, and visited the children at age 7 to assess their language, social communication and phonological awareness skills. She is currently working on publishing the results of this assesment. 

Helen is one of the Senior Tutors for Research in the Centre for Language and Communication Sciences Research and enjoys supporting the centre's PhD students, as well as her own. 

Helen also served as the Programme Director for the cross-school Introduction to Health Sciences foundation programme from 2021 to 2024, and continues to work in this programme. She is passionate about widening participation and EDI, and supporting students to reach their BSc programmes of choice in Speech and Language Therapy, Radiography, Midwifery, Nursing and other professions. 

Helen is on the SHMS EDI Committee and is passionate about using her lived experience of disability and neurodiversity to make real change for others. She is currently engaged in initiatives around neurodiversity training and developing procedures to support neurodivergent doctoral students. 

Qualifications

• MA Academic Practice, City, University of London, United Kingdom, September 2018 - October 2024
• PhD, City, University of London, United Kingdom, October 2012 - May 2019
• MSc Neuroscience, Language and Communication, UCL, UK, September 2009
• BSc Speech Sciences, UCL, UK, August 2008

Employment

• Senior Lecturer, City, University of London, United Kingdom, August 2023 - present
• Research Fellow, City, University of London, United Kingdom, February 2019 - August 2021
• Lecturer, City, University of London, UK, June 2018 - July 2023

2^ndsupervisor

• Anna Harvey, Research Student

Publications by category