Neuroscience Ireland Annual Conference
Rhodri Cusack
Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Prof Cusack's research has two goals: to understand how our brains develop and when different cognitive functions emerge; and to understand how perinatal brain injury affects development. Many babies who acquire brain injury—from a difficult birth or complications following prematurity—develop typically, but other babies don’t, and currently we don’t know why. The approach at the moment is often to ‘wait-and-see’ what problems emerge during childhood—this is stressful for parents and means we’re not intervening early to optimise treatment. Prof Cusack's lab uses neuroimaging to study the emergence of cognition in infants, to understand how our minds develop, and to provide new solutions to a number of pressing clinical needs.
Background
Rhodri Cusack is the Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He uses neuroimaging in infants to study how the mind develops and to provide tools for earlier diagnosis in the neonatal intensive care unit.
After reading physics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he received a PhD in psychology from the University of Birmingham. He was then a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently group leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and then an Associate Professor at the Brain and Mind Institute of the University of Western Ontario.
His research has been funded by the IRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust, BBSRC, EPSRC, CIHR, and NSERC, and he recently received the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant. He has 95 peer-reviewed publications which can be found here.
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