Olivia Dark

Olivia is a part-time PhD student and Research Assistant in the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Early Life Imaging at King’s College London, primarily supervised by Prof. Chiara Nosarti and co-supervised by Dr. Divyangana Rakesh and Dr. Katie Mckinnon. Her doctoral research examines how early family and environmental factors shape children’s behavioural and socio-emotional development across middle childhood. Drawing on data from the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) and the Developing Children’s Connectome Project (DCCP), her work takes a longitudinal approach spanning infancy through to school age, linking early caregiving context to later parent-child interactions and child outcomes. This research integrates parent- and child-reported measures with naturalistic parent-child interaction recordings, behavioural and affective coding, and detailed sociodemographic and early-life information across multiple timepoints from birth to middle childhood (~12 years). Linkage with the National Pupil Database will also provide an additional measure of children’s educational functioning and support needs. Olivia is particularly interested in how caregiving and child characteristics, interact over development and in identifying family factors that promote resilience or protect children in the context of early-life risk. Prior to her PhD, Olivia completed a First-Class BSc in Psychology and a Distinction MSc in Children’s Psychological Disorders (MSc Prize) at Cardiff University. She has previous research experience in face recognition and social processing across typical and neurodivergent populations, contributing to several publications and an EPS-funded VR navigation study.