Nicholas Dowdall completed undergraduate studies in Psychology, Economics and Spanish with distinction, and graduated as top student in his honours degree in Psychology at the University of Cape Town in 2014. He then began an M.Sc degree in Evidence-based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. His focus at Oxford has been on early childhood development interventions. For his M.Sc dissertation, supervised by Professor Frances Gardner and Dr Lucie Cluver, he will be exploring interventions to promote child cognition and language. In October this year he plans to begin a DPhil at Oxford that will explore the effects of dialogic book sharing on child intellectual, social and emotional development, with backing from Oxford, Reading and Stellenbosch universities. It will be conducted in Khayelitsha township outside Cape Town.