Language Development in Exceptional Circumstances

Professor Sir Michael Rutter graduated from Birmingham University Medical School in 1955. After postgraduate posts in neurology, paediatrics and cardiology, he undertook training in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London, qualifying with distinction in 1961 before going to spend a year on a research fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. On his return he joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) Social Psychiatry Unit, remaining until appointed as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 1966, subsequently reader and then, in 1973, Professor of Child Psychiatry and Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

From 1984 to 1998 he was Honorary Director of the MRC Child Psychiatry Research Unit and from 1994 to 1998 he was also Honorary Director of the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, both of which he set up at the Institute of Psychiatry. Since 1998 he has held the position of Professor of Developmental Psychopathology. He has published some 38 books and over 400 scientific papers and chapters.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1987, was knighted in 1992, and was a founder member of both the Academia Europaea and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He is a foreign member of the US Institute of Medicine, and is currently president of the Society for Research into Child Development. He won the Helmut Horten Foundation prize in 1997, the Castilla del Pino prize in 1995, and the Ruane prize in 2000. He has honorary degrees from the Universities of Leiden, Louvain, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Chicago, Minnesota, Ghent, Jyvaskyla, Warwick and East Anglia.

Dorothy Bishop
Professor, Departmentof Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Oxford, England

Daniel Pine
NIMH Intramural Research Program, Bethesda, MD, USA

Steven Scott
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, England

Jim S Stevenson
Associate Dean, Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences and School of Psychology, Southampton, England

Eric Taylor
Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, MRC Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, London, England

Anita Thapar
Professor, Department of Psychological Medicine, Cardiff University School of Medicine, Cardiff, UK