After a stint working in event management as a new Oxford graduate, Cate began her education career teaching French and English at secondary schools in Glasgow in 2004. Then, inspired by her three young children, she ran multilingual music groups for ten years in Cheltenham and Bristol, developing her early years language education venture, Babel Babies, in collaboration with local families and preschool settings.

Always intrigued by the language-learning process, in 2020 Cate returned to the University of Oxford, where she has since completed her master’s in applied linguistics and second language acquisition and embarked on a PhD investigating songs as a pedagogical tool for language acquisition.

Cate is an active champion of multilingualism and rethinking monolingual approaches to learning languages. She has a podcast and blog, The Language Revolution, and has also published Multilingual is Normal, an anthology of 60 voices talking about talking to encourage people to engage with and enjoy languages.

Cate joined the Events Committee in March 2021 as Conference Project Manager.