Maggie is one of the leading scholars in the world in the field of childhood disorders of reading and language.Currently Professor Emerita of Psychology, University of Oxford, and Research Fellow, St. John’s College, she served as President of St. John’s College, Oxford 2012-2022. Maggie holds fellowships of the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Social Science and is a Member of Academia Europae and an Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She led the Centre for Reading and Language at the University of York from 1994-2012 and is Past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. She served on Sir Jim Rose’s Expert Advisory Group on provision for Dyslexia (2009), was advisor to England’s Reception Baseline Assessment (2019) and a panel member for the Department of Education’s Reading Framework 2 (2023). 

Maggie’s publications are required reading in educational psychology courses all over the world, and she has over 68,000 citations. She has been a key member of two Delphi studies seeking consensus among experts on the definitions of dyslexia and of developmental language disorder (DLD; CATALISE) . She is also a founding director of OxEd & Assessment Ltd., an Oxford spin-out focusing on the delivery of interventions to schools to promote the learning of children with special educational needed.   

She was appointed CBE for services to science and the understanding of dyslexia in 2016.