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Welcome to the Cognition, Development and Education (CoDE) Research Lab
Our research seeks to understand why we differ so widely in our abilities to learn, reason, plan and solve problems. We investigate psychosocial and biological pathways that lead to individual differences in cognition, development, and education. We apply an interdisciplinary approach that brings together knowledge and methodologies from psychology, genetics, and the social sciences to investigate causes, correlates, and life-long consequences of individual differences in cognitive development and learning.
News
Dr. Margherita Malanchini is awarded the Queen Mary Research and Innovation Early Career Award
New article for The Conversation.
New research project funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council
Recent Publications
Zhou, Q., Liao, W., Allegrini, A.G, Rimfeld, K., Wertz, J., Morris, T., Raffington, L., Plomin, R., & Malanchini M., (2026) Non-cognitive skills mediate education-related polygenic score associations with academic achievement across development. Nature Communications. Link to publication
Michelini, G., Liao, W., Caserini, C., Eley, T., Ronald, A., Wilson, S., Malanchini, M., & Rimfeld, K. (2026). The neurodevelopmental spectrum: phenotypic architecture, etiology, predictive utility, and specificity across development. Molecular Psychiatry. Link to publication
Ferdinand, R., Suarez, A., Musial, A., Rastle, Andrew McMillan, A., Voronin, I., Malanchini, M., Watling, D., & Rimfeld, K. (2026). School-level administrative data is associated with childhood and young adult mental health: Evidence from a UK longitudinal cohort. BiorXiv. Link to preprint
Rimfeld, K., Ferdinand, R., Suarez, A., Musial, A., Deighton, J., Viding, E., Malanchini, M., Watling, D., Plomin, R., & Rastle, K. (2026). Longitudinal associations between school environment and mental health from childhood through early adulthood. BiorXiv. Link to preprint
Ivan A Kuznetsov, Margherita Malanchini, Oliver Pain, Jonathan Coleman, Philip S Dale, Jean-Baptiste Pingault, Kathleen Rastle, Estonian Biobank Research Team, Peeter Hõrak, Robert Plomin, Andres Metspalu, Kelli Lehto, Vasili Pankratov, Kaili Rimfeld (2026). Genetic influences on educational outcomes during and after the Soviet era: Revisiting evidence from Estonia. BiorXiv. Link to preprint
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