Neurocognitive development in context of exposure to poverty-related risk factors.

Many children growing up in poverty do not meet their milestones with regard to their brain and cognitive development. It is not well understood why the brain is affected in this way, but we suspect that a combination of factors such as poor quality food, reduced access to running water and sanitary facilities, frequent infections and difficulty in obtaining healthcare all affect the developing brain in such a way that children experience difficulties sustaining attention, remembering information or forming lasting social relationships, thus resulting in adverse outcomes for individuals and societies.

My primary aim for this fellowship is to plan further investigations into the role poverty plays in shaping brain development. To this end, I plan to use methods established in my previous research that measure the brain directly, and implement them across a range of settings worldwide. Such an application is vital to understand processes that generalise across settings and might therefore constitute a starting point for the implementation of targeted, effective interventions.

In my previous research I investigated infant brain development in The Gambia, West Africa. In this work, I pioneered the use of different neuroimaging methods in this setting to study memory development, by measuring electric signals (using electroencephalography, or EEG) and blood flow in the brain (using functional near infrared
spectroscopy, or fNIRS). These methods are highly objective and therefore particularly useful for research across different cultural settings.

Having established that these methods can be used to map out longitudinal trajectories of brain development in a low income country, I now plan to implement them across a range of different settings, by collaborating with the Evidence for better Lives Study (EBLS), which will be following large cohorts in Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Vietnam. At each site, a unique set of environmental risk and protective factors play a role (i.e. neighbourhood characteristics, parenting practices, prenatal exposures). If successful, this fellowship would allow me to contribute my expertise on brain development and lead the neuroimaging studies of this project. This would be a natural progression from my PhD research and allow me to establish myself as a leading researcher in the field of global child development within a multidisciplinary team.

A second goal is to assess whether the neuroimaging markers I obtained in my Gambian infant cohort predict cognitive abilities later on. I therefore aim to draw on the EBLS protocol, and implement a subset of its tasks aimed to study cognitive development in young children for a follow up of my Gambian participant cohort. Additionally, I plan to use the fellowship to disseminate my prior research within the academic community through the publication of papers and attendance of conferences. Lastly, I would like to use this fellowship to communicate aspects of my research beyond the academic community, with the aim of sensitising the public at the different study sites to the importance of healthy brain development. To this end, I plan to produce a video explaining how the methods we use to study the brain work. I further aim to assemble an 'Explain-the-Brain' kit, consisting of materials for a range of interactive workshops related to brain development, which I aim to disseminate across EBLS sites.

The integration of my previous work in The Gambia with the EBLS represents an exceptional opportunity to bring together two unique study cohorts. I anticipate that by the end of this fellowship, I will be in an ideal position towards becoming a leading researcher in the field of global neuroscience. This fellowship represents the ideal stepping stone for me to make accessible findings from my prior research and lay the foundations for future research.