Emma Hartnell-Baker is a former owner-manager of Outstanding-rated nurseries, former Ofsted Inspector, SpLD specialist with a Master's degree in Special Educational Needs, and doctoral researcher at the University of Reading. Her lived experience as a neurodivergent learner, combined with professional expertise gained while supporting hundreds of teachers and thousands of children in Australia over a ten-year period, led to the development of Speech Sound Pics®, the only self-paced whole-class phonics approach for the Reception classroom. This work ultimately led to the development of Ortho-GraphiX®, a novel bidirectional word-mapping algorithm with wide-reaching potential across communication, literacy, language learning, assistive technology, educational technology, speech and language therapy, and other applications requiring accurate mapping between spoken and written English. Her work is underpinned by a philosophy of guided self-teaching: "As much explicit instruction as each child needs, and no more." She has a passion for curiosity-led learning.