Speakers

Dr. Taylor is the Director of Functional Neuroimaging and Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and Professor in Medical Imaging and Psychology at the University of Toronto.  Dr. Taylor‘s research has centred on the neural bases of social-cognitive development using MEG, fMRI and MRI.  She and her team have assessed functional and structural brain correlates of high-level cognitive skills, including emotional processes, Theory of Mind and working memory, from early childhood into adulthood, in typically developing, autistic and very preterm-born populations.  Her current focus is the application of OPM-MEG to investigate emerging neural signatures of autism in toddlers.

He researches new ways of reducing brain injury and restoring learning potential after adverse early life events. His significant contributions include characterising atypical brain development after preterm birth using quantitative MRI, elucidating how the perinatal stress environment and systemic inflammation interact with brain development, and mapping the effect of socioeconomic gradients on brain growth. His current work seeks to understand which perinatal exposures confer risk and resilience for neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes in children born preterm and to identify the biological axes that embed those exposures in child development. James is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a past president of the Neonatal Society, holds a UKRI MRC programme grant and is the editor of Avery and MacDonald’s Neonatology, an internationally leading text on pathophysiology and management of the newborn.’

Dr Holmboe is Associate Professor in Developmental Science at the University of Bristol where she runs the Bristol University Baby Lab (BUBL). Her research investigates the development of executive functions during the first 3 years of childhood, with a particular focus on stability, change and the prediction of outcomes, via the employment of longitudinal methods. Until relatively recently, few executive function measures were available for infants and toddlers, in particular tasks that could be used consistently across the first 3 years (without major changes to the task design). However, this has started to change with the development of new early executive function tasks from Dr Holmboe’s lab and other research groups. This now allows us to investigate the development of, and individual differences in, executive function skills at an age that was previously difficult to assess. Furthermore, by combining these new tasks with neuroimaging techniques such as fNIRS and EEG, we have begun to uncover the neural changes underlying the development of executive function skills in the first few years of life.

Victoria Leong is Full Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Founding Director of the Early Mental Potential and Wellbeing Research (EMPOWER) Centre, Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition and Associate Dean (Outreach and Partnerships) of the Graduate College at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also Affiliated A/Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research examines the neural basis of the parent-offspring “social interactome”, across human and rodent species, in both healthy and disease models. She is a pioneer in the use of dyadic-EEG and in the development of culture-fair dyadic sociometric predictive models of infant cognition and developing executive function. This research has been translated into early precision screening tools and personalised interventions (patent-pending), now being trialled in real-world contexts. Her work has received recognition through the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, Robert J. Glushko Prize and the Nanyang Research Award. She previously held the Sutasoma Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (UK), followed by the Parke Davis Fellowship at Harvard University (US). Through her research labs based in Cambridge University and Singapore, she has mentored over 100 early career researchers and research students. Her team is culturally diverse, with researchers hailing from 16 different countries. She has built strategic partnerships across US, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa through international collaborative research programmes worth over SGD$50M (USD$35M), holding over SGD$20M (USD$15M) as Principal Investigator.

Dr. Gang Li is a Full Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a Distinguished Investigator of the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research. His research focuses on developing and disseminating innovative machine learning and AI techniques for advancing neuroimage analysis, with applications to early brain development and brain disorders, resulting in >280 peer-reviewed publications. His lab has released a set of widely used computational tools for pediatric neuroimage analysis, e.g., Spherical U-Net models, UNC 4D Infant Atlases, and iBEAT V2.0.