Leadership

Founding member
Columbia University, USA

Marisa N. Spann, PhD, MPH is Herbert Irving’s Associate Professor of Medical Psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) and Director of the early Neuroimaging, Neuroimmune, and Neuropsychology (early N3) lab.  Dr. Spann is a clinical neuropsychologist with additional training in developmental neuroimaging and perinatal epidemiology and obtained her PhD in clinical psychology at George Washington University.  She went on to pursue an MPH at Yale School of Public Health and an NIH-funded T32 research postdoctoral fellowship in Translational Child Psychiatry at CUIMC.  The overarching goal of her research is to identify early immune, brain, and neuropsychological antecedents of childhood psychiatric risk to reduce the time to intervention for young children.

Founding member
Oregon Health & Science University, USA

Alice Graham completed a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oregon and a clinical internship at the Child Development and Rehabilitation Center at Oregon Health & Science University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. Her research focuses on understanding the influence of stress exposure, beginning in the prenatal period, on the developing nervous system. She is particularly interested in identifying common pathways through which multiple forms of stress and other adverse exposures can contribute to risk for psychiatric disorders and employs structural and functional MRI to study the developing brain beginning in the neonatal period. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and works with children and families in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at OHSU, with a focus on treatment for trauma related symptoms and anxiety.

Founding member
Yale University, USA

Dustin Scheinost is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging at Yale School of Medicine.  Dustin earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Yale University.  For the past ten years, he has been at the forefront of developing novel fMRI tools for real-time fMRI neurofeedback, functional connectivity fMRI, neonatal fMRI, predictive modeling, and recently, fetal fMRI.  In addition, he has been a developer on BioImage Suite and its successor BioImage Suite Web for over 10 years.  He is currently interested in using fetal and neonatal fMRI to study the impact of prenatal exposures.

Founding member
Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, USA 

Lilla Zöllei completed her PhD in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in the Medical Imaging group of Dr. Eric Grimson.  Her doctoral work focused on the theoretical and practical aspects of image registration algorithms using information theoretic criteria.  Her postdoctoral training involved multiple aspects of pair-wise registration problems using both ex-vivo and in-vivo, as well as structural and diffusion MRI scans.  As junior faculty, she started focusing on algorithmic problems associated with the post-processing of infant brain acquisitions in collaboration with the Boston Children’s Hospital.  Presently, she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.  Her scientific investigation focuses on pediatric MRI imaging and developing computational tools that can explore the dynamic aspect of neonatal neurodevelopment.

King’s College London

Tom is a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Clinical Fellow and the Head of the Department of Early Life Imaging, in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London. He is also a Practicing Physician in Pediatric Neurodisability Medicine at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital where he manages the care of children affected by perinatal brain injuries. Tom received his PhD in fMRI methodology from Imperial College London in 2012. His research focuses on characterizing early human brain development and activity with neuroimaging, biophysical modelling of these processes, and studying how they are influenced by external influences such as preterm birth. This is achieved through developing and applying novel methodology including ultra-high field MRI, simultaneous EEG-fMRI, novel MR compatible technology, and computational analysis.

University of California, Davis

Dr. Lindsay Bowman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and Principal Investigator of the Brain and Social Cognition (BASC) Lab. Her work brings together unique perspectives on neuroscience, cognition, social understanding, and development. Her lab uses a combination of neuroscientific (EEG/ERP) and behavioral methods to understand how cognition develops over infancy and childhood, and how these early developments set the course for social success or impairment. Her most recent work focuses on investigating the neural correlates of social cognition in live-interactive settings, and on how brain development interacts with social experiences in the environment to support emerging complex social behavior.

New York University Grossman School of Medicine

Dr. Courtney Filippi is an Assistant Professor at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago and conducted her postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health and University of Maryland. Dr. Filippi’s research investigates the neural mechanisms that underlie early social-emotional development. To do so, her research pairs neuroscientific methods (MRI and EEG) with observational assessments and parent-reports of infant and toddler behavior. Much of her ongoing work is focused on delineating neurobehavioral pathways to developing anxiety. Her work illustrates the ways in which the infant brain provides unique insight into the temperamental origins of anxiety disorders. Over the years she has studied several aspects of emotional behavior (e.g., irritability), infant social cognitive development (i.e., action understanding), and cognitive skills (i.e., language development and cognitive control). Collectively, this body of work demonstrates her expertise in infancy and early childhood, the developing brain, and shows that the infant brain and behavior can shed unique insight into later life outcomes.

University of Caen Normandy

Nadège Roche-Labarbe was born in a rural area in the South-West of France. She was an undergrad in Biology at the University of Bordeaux and completed a Master’s in Cognitive and Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Toulouse. Her Doctoral work at the University of Amiens Medical School focused on studying the neurovascular response using simultaneous fNIRS and EEG in preterm neonates, in epileptic infants and children, and in animal models. Her postdoctoral training at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston MA, USA) focused on optical imaging methods for clinical and cognitive applications in premature and hospitalized neonates. As junior faculty at the University of Caen, back in France, she started focusing on finding neonatal endophenotypes of neurodevelopmental disorders. In parallel she completed a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Child Psychology, dedicating her clinical internships to child welfare institutions, and raised two children. She is now an Associate Professor at the University of Caen, and her team investigates the development of predictive coding in preterm neonates and how this relates to their neurodevelopmental outcome using longitudinal protocols and multimodal neuroimaging.