Following her BA Hons. in English Literature from King’s College, Cambridge (1986), Alys worked as a residential social work assistant. She qualified as a social worker in 1989 with a MSc in Applied Social Studies and a CQSW from Oxford University. She went on to work for Cambridgeshire Social Services as a community mental health social worker, ASW, generic social worker and specialist social worker with Deaf people. She gained her PhD in 1995 from the Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol, on the impact on hearing familes of sign bilingual approaches to early intervention, carrying out her fieldwork in both BSL (British Sign Langauge) and English. Her postdoctoral work developed further her interest in Deaf/hearing professional relations in the context of service provision. In 1997 she returned to social work as a lecturer at the University of Salford where she also led a series of research projects on parenting and deaf children; and social work with d/Deaf people. In 2001 she joined the University of Manchester as Senior Lecturer in Deafness and Deaf Education where her interest in effective multi professional service provision for families with deaf children and disabled children was developed further. She ran the parent-led research component of the national evaluation of the introduction of universal newborn hearing screening in England and directed the national evalation of the Early Support Programme. In 2005, she became Professor of Social Work. She currently leads the Social Reserach with Deaf People group (SORD) which comprises a multidisciplinary, bilingual group of Deaf and hearing researchers working on a range of applied social research projects connected with family, service and community contexts which involve Deaf people. She is an ambassador for Deaf Parenting UK and a Trustee of Manchester Deaf Centre.
