Eva Loth is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London (KCL) and the Principal Investigator of RESPECT 4 Neurodevelopment. She also serves as Deputy Director of AIMS-2-TRIALS, which is a large-scale European consortium aimed at developing precision healthcare for autism. Her work combines developmental, cognitive and neuroimaging approaches to better understand the relationships between social, emotional, motivational and cognitive processes in ‘typical development’ and neurodevelopmental conditions. Her team currently develops a suite of new touch screen tests for pre-schoolers and young people with neurodevelopmental conditions to create a biobehavioural profile for each person.
Personal statement
I was motivated to lead this network because I have been working on precision health for autism for several years. I realised that its success chiefly depends on accurate neurotechnologies. To develop tools that are desired and accepted by users, reliable and that can be feasibly used in the clinic or home requires that all people involved work together from design to implementation.
Emily Jones is a Professor at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests centre on understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms that drive variability in developmental trajectories. In this context, she runs a number of prospective longitudinal studies of neurodevelopment from infancy and directs electrophysiological and eyetracking acquisition across several large-scale European and Global Health studies of children and adults with neurodevelopmental conditions.
Personal Statement: I was interested in helping to lead the network because I believe that interdisciplinary collaboration that includes people with lived experience is critical to leveraging the potential of neurotechnologies to improve quality of life in children and their families.
Tom Arichi is a Reader in Perinatal Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London whose research focuses on developing and applying advanced novel neuroimaging methods (particularly MRI and EEG) to understand early human brain development in health and disease. He is also a Consultant in Paediatric Neurodisability at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital where he manages the long term care of children who have unfortunately suffered an injury around the time of birth. Tom is the lead on the Scalability theme working group.
Personal Statement: A large motivation for my work and involvement in the network comes through my clinical work, where I believe that we should and can be doing better to improve the lives of young people with neurodevelopmental conditions. I passionately believe that neurotechnology in all of its different forms is key to making that difference and that working together as a community is vital to keep driving the field forwards.
Ilias Tachtsidis is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London. He is a senior member of the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory and leads the MultiModal Spectroscopy group and the MetaboLight team. His work is cross-disciplinary integrating engineering, physics, neuroscience and clinical medicine; with the research focus to engineer the next generation of optical near-infrared systems to image the brain. His team currently develops neurotechnology instruments based on broadband Near-Infrared Spectroscopy systems or bNIRS with the capacity to monitor and image both brain oxygenation and metabolism.
Personal statement
I am an engineer working at the interface of optical technology developments and biomedical/clinical applications. My motivation is based around the idea that there is an urgent need for new sensing technologies to drive the innovations in healthcare and in particular to improve our understanding of brain function. I want to transform imaging of brain health and function with simple, reliable, non-invasive, objective, and universally applicable techniques. To deliver this transformation we need to work as a community and I am confident our network will facilitate this.
Robert Leech is a Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College London. His research focuses on the use of neuroimaging techniques to understand brain function and behaviour in healthy individuals and those with psychiatric and neurological disorders. He has particular expertise in the use of functional MRI to study the brain’s network architecture and its relevance for cognition and behavior.
Elizabeth Burchell is a neurodevelopmental psychologist working in the area of child development. Her research work covers areas of language development, social development and educational support for those with neurodivergent conditions (specifically Downs syndrome, Word Finding Difficulties, Autism and William syndrome, Dyslexia). In particular, she is interested in and has most recently been looking at individual differences and developmental trajectories in children with Down syndrome (from the LonDownS Infant stream) to aid identification of key areas for support. Her work has also included helping to understand what factors contribute to a good practice such as inclusion and how practices around transition impact mental health in these populations (transitions from primary to secondary school and investigating transitional changes in education for families and neurodivergent children during the COVID-19 pandemic). Her work seeks to increase the child’s voice within these frameworks and provide a place for them to flourish.
Personal statement:
My interest in the network has come from my experience of working with families of neurodivergent children. We have so much to learn from each other, the users, the creators and the implementers of neurotechnology which can shape the future towards being more inclusive and supportive towards maximising every child’s developmental journey.
Amy Goodwin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London and the co-ordinator of the Respect 4 Neurodevelopment network. Amy specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience and has experience of running multi-site studies investigating brain development in infants and young children, both in the UK and internationally.