She also leads the Department of Early Childhood and Primary School Programmes at The Promise Foundation, a Bangalore-based charity that works in the field of literacy and livelihoods. In the last decade she has successfully completed two large scale language and reading programmes in Kannada and English. In 2009 she was the recipient of the Royal Society and British Academy's Newton International Fellowship. She is currently coordinating an international team of scholars to establish the evidence base for what works in the teaching of language, literacy and numeracy in developing countries. A recent interest is to understand the role of visual complexity of writing systems on the learning process.