Interview with Sam Wass

Sam Wass is director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years at the University of East London, studying the impact of living environments on early childhood development. An active science communicator, Professor Wass was the on-screen scientist for the award-winning Channel 4 series The Secret Life of 4-, 5- and 6-Year-Olds and has fronted press campaigns for Public Health England and the Department for Education.

Where and when were you born and how has this shaped who you are?
Lewisham, southeast London in 1979. I – just like everyone in my family – am high energy, high stress, which might be genetics, or it might be the Lewisham in me. This is very much a theme of my work, looking at how different types of environments influence children’s stress and what we can do to change our teaching styles to optimise them for high-stress children.

When did you know you wanted to work with children? Are they willing research partners?
At parties I’m always the one hanging out in the garden with the kids rather than in the main room with the grown-ups. To be honest I just find the conversations way more interesting. For example, I got into a five-minute argument with an eight-year-old recently at a birthday about whether or not hamburgers grow underground like potatoes, which I failed to win, despite telling the child that I was a professor. I still wish that I could do that thing that kids do at a family mealtimes when it gets boring, where you just slide down off your seat and sit under the table, looking at everyone’s ankles. Most of my research is with younger children, in the zero-to-five age range – so it’s not so much about engaging them, explaining what you’re doing, as it is about getting the sleight of hand right so they don’t notice what you’re doing (once the parents have consented!). One day I’d love to do some research with older children, though, where we engage them in setting the research questions as well. Kids are often so confident in free associating. They don’t know much and they don’t know what they don’t know, so they’re happy to recombine fragments of knowledge to answer a novel question. I’d love to apply that to my research. It’s tough once your brain gets calcified.

Tell us about the work of your institute at UEL.
We’re funded by respectable funders – the European Research Council, the European Union, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Medical Research Council – but as a group I’d say we’re fairly iconoclastic. For example, at the moment there’s a movement in child psychology to focus on executive control and other faculties that are located “within” a child’s head. To measure them you take that child away from their natural setting, give them some computer tasks that you’ve designed that you think should test executive control and then look at what’s happening in their brain as they do them. In my group we take a different approach. We study executive control, but we do so in a more context-specific way – more focused on measuring and trying to understand individual differences in performance on real tasks performed in actual settings. We emphasise how environments and contexts differ – to understand how a child might be fine in one setting but not in another – and the importance of the fit between a child and their environment. To do this we use a lot of naturalistic, multi-person brain recordings during free-flowing interactions and home-wearable microphones, cameras and physiological monitors, which we analyse with machine learning to make sense of environments that are complex and multi-layered.

Why did you move the project to the University of East London?
I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford, my PhD in London and my postdoc at Cambridge. I moved to UEL in 2016 when I had an Economic and Social Research Council Fellowship, which was looking at stress in babies and toddlers from underprivileged backgrounds. But I’ve stayed here so long because I find it much easier to keep my research feeling fresh. At Cambridge I felt I was getting cocooned in a community of like-minded researchers and I was finding it hard to avoid groupthink. At UEL the student body is much more local and demographically diverse than at most universities, and they’re often mature students with interesting life experiences who have their own children. When I talk about my research with them they ask very different questions from those my other researchers and collaborators do – which I find very stimulating.

Can universities such as yours continue to support world-class research in the current climate?
Yes – definitely! I’m always mystified by why so many active researchers try to gravitate to higher-ranked universities. UEL has been super supportive, grateful that I’m bringing in grant income, and if you do then it makes so much more of a difference than it does at Cambridge.

How much does your work influence your own parenting?
It’s more that parenting keeps me feeling humble. I’m supposed to be an expert in child stress – so, as my wife asks me regularly, why can’t I stop my own three-year-old from tantrumming?!

How easy is it to translate what you do for popular television shows?
It’s fun, but there are a couple of challenges. The first is communicating the fragility of knowledge: we think we know x, but if new data comes in we’ll have to change our minds, which is tough in a time-pressured format. The second is that I always think it’s important to show childhood as it really is, which for a lot of children involves a lot of negative moods and emotion dysregulation. If it’s done sensitively then there’s a huge amount to learn about the human experience from showing this. But every time we’ve sent a cut to the channel they've sent it back and said “that’s great – can you just cut the bits where they’re crying…”, which can be frustrating.

If you weren’t an academic, what do you think you’d be doing?
Probably a stay-at-home dad, a bit reclusive, hanging out with my kids under the table at birthday parties, teaching them how to tie people’s shoelaces together without them realising. In a lot of ways that’s what I do as an academic anyway.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com

CV

1998-2001 Bachelor of psychology, University of Oxford
2001-11 Freelance opera director in UK, Germany and Austria
2008-11 PhD in psychology, Birkbeck, University of London
2011-12 Postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck
2013-15 British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge
2016-18 Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders Fellowship, University of East London
2019-present European Research Council Starter Grant Fellowship, UEL
2021-present Professor of psychology, UEL
2024-present Director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years, UEL

Appointments

Marine biologist Emma Johnston has been announced as the first female vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne and will replace Duncan Maskell in February 2025. A well-known television presenter and science communicator, Professor Johnston is currently deputy vice-chancellor (research) at the University of Sydney and previously spent more than 20 years at UNSW Sydney. Professor Johnston said Melbourne was a “research powerhouse” and a source of “resilient graduates” with flexibility and know-how.

Dennis Lo Yuk-ming will be the next vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from January 2025, replacing Rocky Tuan. Professor Lo has worked at the university since 1997 and held a series of roles including most recently associate dean (research) for the Faculty of Medicine. Professor Tuan said he was confident his successor would “guide the university to reach new heights, while upholding its unique legacy and commitment to excellence”.

Donna Whitehead has been named as the new vice-chancellor of the University of Brighton. She is currently deputy vice-chancellor at the University of South Wales and previously held the same role at London Metropolitan University.

Enrico Letta, the former Italian prime minister, has been appointed dean of the School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs at IE University. He is currently the president of the Jacques Delors Institute.

Jan Hesthaven has become the president of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He was previously provost and vice-president for academic affairs of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Ulster University has announced that Stephen Farry and Jodie Carson will co-lead the creation of a new Ulster University Strategic Policy Unit. Dr Farry was previously an MP and deputy leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, while Dr Carson was previously the special adviser to the minister for agriculture, environment and rural affairs.

Katy Mason has been appointed pro vice-chancellor at the University of Salford and dean of its business school, joining from the Lancaster University Management School, where she was the associate dean for research between 2020 and 2023.