Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging & Developmental Science Center

Dr. Peeva works in the fields of functional and structural connectivity of the brain. Her research aims to understand how the neural connectivity architecture supports healthy human function and what breaks down in neuropsyhiatric disorders. Dr. Peeva is a co-postdoctoral fellow at the Congenital Disorders of Axon Guidance Lab and the Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. Her current work bridges genetic and neuroimaging studies in mice and humans in order to understand how tubulin-encoding genes are involved in the formation of brain connections and how normal connectivity is compromised in disorders such as congenital cranial dysinnervation disorders.

Dr. Peeva received her PhD training at Boston University where she studied autism, speech and language, and sensory-motor control at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neurotechnology. She employed functional and diffusion MRI as well as functional connectivity modeling in order to answer questions like what networks are involved in producing speech, how each brain region contributes to the process and what neural connectivity abnormalities are present in patients with autism. Some of these projects were done in collaborations with the Psychiatric Neuroimaging group at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Cognitive Psychology Lab in Marseille, France.