Virginia joined Roehampton in 2021. Her specialisms lie in social developmental psychology. Before joining Roehampton, she launched Growing up bilingual, an ESRC-fund Collaborative DTP project (2018-22). The team collaborated with the Newham Partnership for Complementary Education/NPCE and the NRCSE, which oversaw heritage language school provisions. The project tracked social, cognitive and educational outcomes alongside the language proficiency of bilinguals who had complementary language schooling and those who did not.

The GUB project led to other activities since she joined Roehampton:

GUB: Researcher-Practitioner Synergies series, which Virginia gained BPS funding to run (2021-22) after joining Roehampton. The 3-part series engaged academics and practitioners invested in supporting bilingual development and aided the next study below.

Becoming Bilingual: Funds of Knowledge from Learners, Educators and Providers across Sectors (Research England, Roehampton Seed Fund: Enhancing Research Culture). in 2023. BB involved learners and teachers in reciprocal peer observations and innovative networks for co-creating funds of knowledge exchanged for good practices and challenges.

Most recently, Intergen (2023-4; Southlands Methodist Trust) and Multilingual Emotional Support programme (MES; BIG South London): Intergen explores intergenerational changes in language practice, identity and community needs in heritage language schools, from the perspectives of students, alumni and teachers and founders. MES is a mental health promotion collaboratively delivered with the FEWP to capture the language-related mental health states and needs of ESOL leaners.

Before the realms of bilingual development, Virginia's research focused on identities based on ethnicity, gender, nationality and religion, intergroup processes, and their impact on psychological outcomes. Her research in diversity issues included cross-cultural variations in social cognition and dual-heritage people's identity and adjustment. Recent Interdisciplinary initiatives includes the Climate Change Challenge (Schools of Education; Wolfgang Mann, now U Cologne, and Arts Eva Eppler) in which children from six countries from wrote over 1,000 narratives on climate topics.

Virginia became the co-convenor for the BPS-accredited MSc Psychology in September 2021 and led the validation of the new MSc Developmental Psychology in 2024-25. She teaches undergraduates and postgraduates, including the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology; PsychD. She is a co-author of the book Developmental Psychology (2011, 2016 and 2013 Italian ed; Pearson), with its third edition pubilished in 2025.

Apart from external consultancy and examining, Virginia is an Associate Editor for the journal Social Development (Wiley).

To contact Virginia, please email: [email protected]