Rate My Professor Anne Castles

Anne Castles is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, where she also serves as Scientific Director of the Macquarie University Centre for Reading and Honorary Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences. Her research centers on reading development and dyslexia, with a focus on variability within the reading-impaired population and the causes of different types of dyslexia. She completed an honours degree in Psychology at the Australian National University in 1987 and a PhD at Macquarie University in 1993, supervised by Max Coltheart. After her doctorate, Castles taught and researched at the University of Melbourne's Department of Psychology before returning to Macquarie in 2007 as a research appointee at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. She later became Head of the Department of Cognitive Science and Scientific Director of the Centre for Reading. In 2022, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for her project 'Literacy in adolescence: The next major challenge in the science of reading,' aimed at improving literacy outcomes for secondary school students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Castles has garnered significant recognition for her contributions, including Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA, 2010), Fellowship of the Royal Society of New South Wales (FRSN, 2015), the 2020 UK Economic and Social Research Council Celebrating Impact Prize for her influential paper on reading acquisition, the 2017 Eminent Researcher Award from Learning Difficulties Australia, and the 2014 Distinguished Professor Award from Macquarie University. She served as President of Learning Difficulties Australia from 2017 to 2018 and holds editorial board positions on Scientific Studies of Reading, Cognitive Neuropsychology, and the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Key publications include 'The effects of morphological instruction on literacy outcomes for children in English-speaking countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis' (2024, Educational Psychology Review), 'Orthographic facilitation of English vocabulary learning in monolingual and bilingual children' (2025, Reading and Writing), 'Eye tracking and simulating the spacing effect during orthographic learning' (2025, Reading Research Quarterly), and the seminal 'Putting the learning into orthographic learning' with Kate Nation (2017). Her work has profoundly influenced reading instruction and policy worldwide.