Hal is a DPhil Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation candidate, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. He is supervised by Professors Jamie Lachman and Frances Gardner.
For his research, Hal is investigating how parents can promote their children's early learning. This includes a longitudinal study of how the quality of parent-child book-sharing predicts children's language and literacy outcomes, a meta-analysis of parenting interventions' potential to promote children's literacy development in LMICs, and an investigation into the effectiveness of a hybrid digital-human playful parenting intervention in Malaysia to promote children's literacy and numeracy.
Hal is a Research Manager for the Global Parenting Initiative's "Parenting within the preschool system in Malaysia" project, a factorial multisite randomised trial led by Professor Jamie Lachman. It aims to optimise the effectiveness and scalability of a hybrid Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) intervention on parenting, learning through play, and child educational outcomes when embedded within a national government education system for low-income families in Malaysia.
Previously Hal has worked as a research assistant in the field of parenting and child development in South Africa and in the UK, and also has experience as a Project Manager for an NGO in Sicily in the education and development sector, primarily working with migrants and refugees.
Hal has an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford, an MA in Education from UCL's Institute of Education, and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Cape Town.
