Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am a developmental neuroscientist. My research program aims to study how the human brain matures from infancy to adulthood, as it acquires new life skills and behaviors: What are the origins of neural and cellular mechanisms of brain development during infancy? How does the trajectory of cellular mechanisms unfold during development, as school-aged children acquire complex skills such as reading or face recognition? What are some of the parallels in brain development across primate species? What changes occur in the brain in developmental disorders such as autism, multiple sclerosis, and dyslexia.
I use a multi-modal approach by combining different techniques to study the brain. I use neuroimaging methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), quantitative MRI (qMRI), and diffusion MRI (dMRI) as well as behavioral observations, histology, comparative methods across humans and macaques, and intracranial electroencephalography. This combination of complementary techniques provides a unified understanding of how the brain’s anatomy, function, and behavior co-develop to achieve complex human skills.
