Maggie is one of the leading scholars in the world in the field of childhood disorders of reading and language. She led the Centre for Reading and Language at the University of York from 1994-2012, and has recently been appointed President of St. John’s College, Oxford. She is Past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, and she has the rare distinction of having been elected both Fellow of the British Academy of Medical Sciences and Fellow of the British Academy (for humanities and social sciences). Her publications are required reading in educational psychology courses all over the world, and her book ‘Dyslexia’ (1987) has over 1,200 citations. Maggie regularly works with colleagues in schools and university education departments, and the York team’s approach to addressing reading failure by linking the teaching of phonics with a focus on children’s literature has been widely adopted.