I received my bachelors degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2004. I joined Dr. Nelson's lab during my last year of undergraduate studies after completing a directed research project at the Center for Neurobehavioral Development. This experience got me interested in the processes associated with brain development during the neonatal period into adolescence and that factors that can affect normal development. In the Nelson lab I worked as a principal/senior lab technician on several of the "Neural Mechanisms of Early Memory Development" studies which examine the development of face and object processing during the first year of life. Currently, I am the Clinical Research Coordinator for the Developmental Medicine Center Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, where I have the enormous opportunity to work on Dr. Nelson's collaborations with scientists from MIT and Harvard examining several clinical populations, including autism. I am also heading up the creation of a participant recruitment database for the Boston area, which includes infants and children of all ages and backgrounds to facilitate the contacting of families interested in participating in research.
I received my bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of North Dakota in 1997 and have had the pleasure of working as Dr. Nelson's Lab Coordinator since 1999. I oversee Dr. Nelson's large research program on the typical development of face processing, and since moving to the Boston area in 2005 we have continued our exciting work on projects with research groups around the world. My graduate work in child public health and toxicology has been complementary to several projects, including the work in Chile that is examining the long-term outcomes of iron deficiency, a project conducted in the Inuit community in northern Quebec examining the long-term effects of exposure to environmental contaminants, as well as the research being done in Romania that is examining the efficacy of foster care as a means of remediating early deprivation suffered during early institutionalization.
I received a B.A. in Psychology from Rutgers University, Camden, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. My primary research interest is to elucidate the neural and behavioral mechanisms that underlie both typical and atypical social-emotional and social-communicative development. Much of my research has focused on young children who have been diagnosed with autism, as well as infants who are at high risk for developing autism. One of the long-term goals of this research is to use the information gathered from a neuroscience perspective to develop interventions for infants and children who are at risk for social-emotional and social-communicative difficulties. I joined Dr. Nelson's laboratory in June of 2007, with support from the Cure Autism Now Foundation to conduct research on the relationship between atypical face processing and social-emotional functioning in young children with autism.
I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Nelson Lab, having received both an S.B.
degree (2002) and a Ph. D. (2007) from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. I am generally interested in high-level recognition skills in adults and infants, with an emphasis on face recognition. My work to date has been focused on integrating computer vision models with visual psychophysics, a strategy I hope to keep pursuing while studying the development of face and object expertise with Dr. Nelson. In particular, I am interested in contributing to our understanding of the nature of "perceptual narrowing" over the course of visual development.
I joined the Nelson lab as a post-doctoral fellow in September 2006 after receiving my Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Harvard University in 2006. My main line of research concerns the development of social cognition, in particular how infants and children come to think of themselves and others members of different social categories ( e.g., gender, race, age), and how this changes over the course of development. To study these questions, I use a combination of behavioral, psychophysiological (e.g., heart rate), and neuroscience (e.g., ERP) methods.
I received a B.A. in psychology from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. I am primarily interested in the impact of non-optimal-but not necessarily extreme-experience on the brain. In my dissertation I examined the impact of subtle differences in early relationships with parents on subtle changes in stress hormones (i.e., cortisol) and cognitive functions known to be impacted by stress (e.g., memory and executive functioning). As a post-doc in the Nelson laboratory, and in collaboration with researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, I have broadened my research interests to also consider the effects of other individual differences and corresponding fluctuations in hormones on these same cognitive functions. Using ERP and behavioral techniques, I am currently investigating the role of leptin, a hormone that varies by body fat and nutrition, on memory and executive function.
I received my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in December, 2008 in psychology with an emphasis in clinical psychology. I attended internship at NYU Child Study Center/Bellevue Hospital 2006-2007. My general interest area is in the environmental variables which effect the development of the brain generally and frontal-striatal systems specifically. My graduate research focused on the neural correlates of working memory and inhibition in adolescents with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While at Berkeley I also examined the neural correlates of learning in children raised in different socioeconomic status environments using fMRI. As a post doctoral researcher in the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscienc I plan to continue this cross-disciplinary investigation into the effect of environmental variables on brain development. I am currently running studies which examine stress, learning, and memory in children ages 8-12 years. My hope is to discover changes in neurobiology which may mediate the relationship between social variables, stress, and health outcomes.
I joined the Nelson Lab as a post-doctoral fellow in October 2008 after completing my Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Stanford University. My graduate work focused on cognitive development, primarily examining representations of number and quantity in infants and preschoolers. During my postdoc years, I am interested in studying the relationship between cognitive development and brain development in both typically and atypically developing children. To this end, I will be involved in two longitudinal studies, one looking at the behavioral and neural correlates of memory development in infants who have suffered a hypoxic-ischemic injury at birth, and a second study looking at the behavioral and neural correlates of social-emotional development in infant siblings of children with autism. With both groups at risk for atypical development, these studies aim to uncover a set of markers in infancy which could be used for early identification of children who will develop difficulties, with the ultimate goal of recommending earlier interventions for these children. Additionally, I will be involved in a set of studies using a new method for assessing brain activity in infancy, Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), to further understand brain development across the first year of life.
I received a B.A. in psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in developmental and clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota. I have completed a fellowship in infant mental health and postdoctoral training in the assessment and treatment of traumatic stress responses. I am primarily interested in understanding the ways in which children become vulnerable to developing mental health problems early in development. One specific area where I have focused is the study of the impact of maternal anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder on infant emotional and biological development. I am currently investigating associations between mothers' traumatic life experiences and mothers' and infants' abilities to regulate their emotions and their physiological responses to stress. For example, in collaboration with Dr. Nelson and other lab members, I am examining how infants of mothers with significant trauma histories may process emotions differently at the neural level than infants of mothers without a significant trauma history. I hope that the information from these studies will help us prevent the development of mental health problems in children.
I received both my Masters degree and my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology/Neuropsychology from the University of Vienna, Austria -the latter in collaboration with Washington University in St. Louis. I completed a clinical post-doctoral fellowship in Pediatric Neuropsychology at Childrens Hospital Boston followed by a research fellowship funded by the National Institutes of Health. I joined the faculty of Childrens Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2003. My research has focused on hormonal and immune influences on brain and behavioral development in both children with chronic illness and children experiencing stress. Specific studies investigate the effects of steroids on memory and learning in children treated for inflammatory conditions involving the immune system (i.e. Crohns disease) and for leukemia. In a longitudinal project supported by NIH, we study the brain effects of steroids, immune response, and stress on learning in ill and healthy children. We use neuropsychological assessments, neuroimaging (fMRI) and electrophysiological (ERP) tools in collaboration with Dr. Nelson and the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience with the goal to elucidate brain-immune interactions and the safety of steroid therapy much needed for treatment of pediatric illness.
I am currently a doctoral student in Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I received my B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Wesleyan University, my M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Universit? Paris VI, and my Ed.M. in Mind, Brain and Education from Harvard's School of Education. My research interests are in the relationship among biological, cognitive, and social development particularly as they relate to development in children with autism. For my dissertation, I will be working with Dr. Nelson on understanding how genetic, neural, and cognitive information together help explain aspects development in autism.
I graduated in June of 2008 with an MD from Harvard Medical, and I am now working towards a PhD through the Medical Engineering/Medical Physics program offered by Harvard-MIT's Health Science and Technology Department. I joined the lab to learn more about the similarities and differences between development and neural plasticity, and the ways in which this can be studied with neuroimaging techniques. Prior to my medical degree, I received an A.B. in Art History and Neuroscience from Princeton University. My research interests are in plasticity, and using multi-modal neuroimaging to study defined periods of time in which neural plasticity is thought to occur. Using a multi-modal approach, I am hoping to study children with craniofacial deformities, and to determine the neuro-anatomical and cognitive differences that may exist in these patients as compared to normal development. Further, I would like to examine how correction of craniofacial deformities affects the process of normal/abnormal development, and what forms of neural plasticity are associated with these corrective procedures.
I joined the Nelson lab as Recruitment Coordinator in June of 2007. Prior to that time, I worked in a variety of fields, including running a preschool after school program, promoting youth programs at a Boston public relations firm, and teaching college-level writing while pursuing my MFA at Emerson College. All of those experiences have been shaped by my interest in how children and adolescents learn, whether at the preschool or college level. Through my work here in the lab, I have been able to continue to pursue that interest in new and exciting ways. As Recruitment Coordinator, I have the opportunity to raise awareness of the lab's work within the Greater Boston community. I truly enjoy talking with people about how we are working to improve our understanding of infant and child development. Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions, or if you are interested in signing up for our Participant Recruitment Database, through which families with infants and children have the option to be contacted about ongoing research opportunities.
Meghan Saunders
I am currently an undergraduate at Emmanuel College studying Developmental Psychology. I joined the LCN last year as a sib-sitter, and assisted other lab members with a variety of studies. I am now the Recruitment Assistant, and will be helping with recruitment and community outreach. I hope to contribute to our efforts to raise awareness of the lab's work within the Boston community and connect with parents and families who are interested in research.
I received an Sc.B. in Neuroscience from Brown University in the spring of 2008. My time in the Nelson Lab began in the summer of 2007, when I began working with data from a longitudinal study concerning the long-term cognitive effects of early iron deficiency on Chilean school-aged children. The completed paper was accepted as my undergraduate honors thesis. As a research assistant, I am currently involved in a large-scale study that examines the role of early experience in the development of face processing. More specifically, this study will strive to chart the course of perceptual narrowing in infants. Additionally, it will explore the breadth of an infant's perceptual window through discrimination tasks in categories such as age, species, gender, and race.
I graduated from Wellesley College with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology with a minor in music. Currently at Dr. Nelson's lab, my research is focused on the Infant Sibling Project, a collaborative longitudinal study between Boston University and Children's Hospital Boston. We will be working with infants who are at an increased risk for autism spectrum disorder or language impairment. Specifically, we will be using both ERP and eye tracking data to identify signs of language or communication problems.
I obtained my B.A. in psychology from Mount Holyoke College, where I developed a strong interest in clinical and developmental child psychology. I was privileged to become a member of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in December 2007. I am currently involved in two research studies that are designed to investigate emotional reactivity and regulation in infants and preschool-aged children. Specifically, the aim of the studies are to ascertain whether children who are at increased risk for developing anxiety difficulties process emotional expressions differently from children who are at low risk for anxiety difficulties.
