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Laura Monroy
Executive Officer
Email: l.monroy@ucl.ac.uk
I currently hold the position of Executive Officer at DCAL and am a member of the PALS HR & EDI Team. In my role, I lead a team of Professional Services staff at DCAL and work closely with the PALS HR & EDI Team Manager and the Director of DCAL. In addition to supporting the Director of DCAL in various duties, I also undertake diverse management, planning, and organisational responsibilities for the overall management of DCAL. Furthermore, I provide support for PALS-wide initiatives related to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).
Prior to joining DCAL, I completed a PhD in Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and DCAL at UCL. During my PhD my aim was to understand why a sizable proportion of deaf people struggle to learn how to read, while others excel at it and show no significant differences to their hearing counterparts. In order to shed some light on the underlying causes of these differences, I developed an experimental research project where I studied a range of variables and made comparisons across different languages (Spanish and English) and different stages of reading development.
Before starting my graduate degree at UCL, I held non-academic roles for several years, where I supervised and led teams and provided administrative support in different centres, such as a health rehabilitation centre in Mexico and the Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre in the University of Oxford.
Working at DCAL has a significant personal value for me as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). Growing up with deaf parents has allowed me to witness many of the barriers that a deaf person has to face and overcome in our society. Therefore, the opportunity for me to work in a place surrounded by deaf professionals is inspiring and motivates me to give my best every day.
I am also deeply committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. As a woman working in both academic and non-academic roles, and as a migrant from Latin America living in the UK for over 10 years, I’ve had experiences that have strengthened my commitment to raising awareness of biases towards minorities and reinforcing the importance of treating everyone equally, regardless of their language, country, physical appearance, and other factors.
