Annette Karmiloff-Smith was a professorial research fellow at Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. Before moving to Birbeck, she was Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the Institute of Child Health.  She was an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects many parts of the body and also Down’s Syndrome.

Karmiloff-Smith argued against approaches that take a modality-specific approach to developmental disorders – approaches that state, for example, that autism arises because of a failure of the “theory of mind” module, or that children with specific language impairment lack a genetically determined “language module.”

Over forty years of research, she developed a new understanding of how genetic and environmental factors interact to give rise to different outcomes in individuals and said that developmental disorders should not be understood as “normal minus something broken”.

Karmiloff-Smith authored a number of books and academic articles, most notably Beyond Modularity in 1992 and Rethinking Innateness in 1996.