Antecedents of aberrant cognitive development in early life

Aberrant neurodevelopment in the first two years of life is an early predictor of later negative psychiatric, social and educational outcome. Understanding how inter-individual differences in developmental trajectory occur is difficult however, with multiple social, clinical and genetic factors exerting an influence on the already complex process of early life brain maturation.

To better understand the interplay between these factors I will primarily use data from the Developing Human Connection Project (dHCP). The dHCP has acquired multi-modal MRI images and associated demographic and clinical data from several hundred infants soon after birth, with subsequent neurodevelopmental assessment at 18 months.

Although neonatal neuroimaging is no longer a young field there are remarkably few published studies which correlate neuroimaging phenotype in early life to later neurodevelopmental outcome. One possible reason for this is the difficulty in adjusting for the different social risk factors which contribute to early life outcome.

During my project I will identify groups of higher and lower social risk individuals using data-driven methods in available demographic data. I will then seek to understand how social risk modulates the relationship between neuroimaging phenotype at birth, polygenic risk factors and later neurodevelopmental outcome. To do so, I will use methods that integrate complex multi-modal data, such as similarity network fusion (SNF) and non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF).