The Cusack Lab

We study the development of infants in their first year of life. We are based at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, and collaborate with maternity hospitals in Dublin and other centres across Ireland. Our expertise and backgrounds range from physics to psychology and neonatology to neuroscience. We use many methods to study infant development, including online tasks and MRI.

Principal Investigator

Rhodri Cusack, MA (Hons) Cantab, PhD, FTCD
The Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Director, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
School of Psychology
Trinity College Dublin
​Rhodri with son, Calin

The Team

Research Assistants
Jessica White (Lab Manager, FOUNDCOG Recruitment Coordinator and Research Assistant)
​Jessica completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at Dublin City University, followed by a M.Sc. in Behavioural Neuroscience at University College Dublin. Her interests are focused on bridging the gap between developmental neuroscience and psychology.
Aoibhe De Burca (Research Assistant)
Aoibhe has just completed her B.A. in Psychology and French at Trinity College Dublin (2022). She is currently working as a research assistant on some of the online studies at the Cusack Lab, particularly looking through a cross-cultural lens to improve study recruitment. 
Claire Ambre (Second Year Undergraduate Student, Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia University)
Postdocs
Lorijn Zaadnoordijk, PhD
​Lorijn completed a bachelor’s degree in language and cognition and a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience before starting her PhD project at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In her PhD project, she investigated how a sense of agency develops in early infancy. She used theories and methods from (developmental) cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind to answer how one could study subjective experiences in preverbal infants and how the capacities underlying the sense of agency emerge in the first months of life.
Anna Truzzi, PhD
Anna obtained her PhD from the University of Trento (Italy) working on a research in collaboration with the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (Japan) and the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) which combined developmental and comparative psychology.
​In the Cusack Lab Anna’s research is focused on combining developmental neuroscience with deep learning methods in order to model how the infants’ brain learns during the first year of life.
Graduate Students
Chiara Caldinelli (PhD candidate)
Chiara received her bachelor’s in cognitive science and master’s in neuroscience from the University of Padua, Italy, and then became a qualified psychologist with the aim to bridge neuroscience and developmental psychology. She is interested in how higher cognitive functions develop and how early experience can shape the way we look at the world. Chiara is also the president of the Dublin University Neuroscience Society, the social coordinator of the OHBM Student/Postdoc Special Interest Group, and an associate editor at the Journal of European Psychology Students.
Anna Kravchenko (PhD candidate)
Studied mathematics and computer science at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia.
Anna is interested in Bayesian modelling and its applications to psychology, especially concept learning, developmental theories and models of selective attention.​
​Graham King (PhD Candidate)
Graham is a neonatology specialist registrar doctor (RCPI) who has worked in many neonatal and paediatric departments around Ireland. Graham studied both medicine and engineering in university. He has worked clinically for many years in  both paediatrics and neonatology and has also managed to combine his clinical work with medical research. Graham has a keen interest in investigating methods to predict infant neurodevelopmental outcomes, infant brain resilience and infant brain plasticity, and possible future clinical applications of fMRI in neonatology. 
Clíona O'Doherty (PhD Candidate)
​Clíona has just completed her B.A. in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin. Having undertaken her final year thesis in the Cusack Lab she is now continuing to research the exciting possibilities of using artificial intelligence to model the brain's complex cognitive processes. Her interests are focussed on deep learning as a tool in neuroscience research, specifically at the crossroads between computer and biological vision.
Áine T. Dineen (PhD Candiate)
​​​Áine completed her B.A in Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin (2021). Conducting her capstone project research in the Cusack Lab, she explored ways in which deep learning can be leveraged to test theories of infant visual development. Áine’s current research focus on using deep learning to develop more robust methods of motion correction for fMRI image reconstruction, with the aim of increasing the amount of usable data that is generated from fMRI scans. In particular, we hope that this research will have benefits for infant fMRI, where around 50% of all data is currently lost due to head motion.
Josué Rico Picó (Visiting PhD Candidate, Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC), University of Granada)
Josué completed a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Granada, Spain. His work has focused on the development of intrinsic brain oscillations and their relationship with the emergence of high-order cognitive processes in babies. Currently, he is visiting Cusack’s lab to implement new cutting-edge techniques to analyse brain oscillations in collaboration with Anna Truzzi and Rhodri Cusack.
Amy Burke (H.Dip in Psychology, Trinity College Dublin) 
Amy is completing her postgraduate H.Dip in Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. Amy is conducting her final year project with the Cusack lab and is interested in the relationship between gestational age and attention in infants born pre-term and at-term. Amy hopes to investigate what captures an infant’s attention and whether brain imaging data indicates less activity in premature infants.
Undergraduate Students
​Maebh Healy (Final Year Psychology Student, Trinity College Dublin) 
Maebh is completing her B.A. in Psychology at Trinity College Dublin and is currently carrying out her final year project under the supervision of the Cusack lab. Maebh hopes to investigate the presence of a default mode network in infants at 2 months old using fMRI. Maebh has a particular interest in the awake infant mind and aspires to assess its capacity for mind-wandering and internally directed thought - a concept which is presently understudied in infants at this developmental stage.
​Thalia Garnett (Final Year Psychology Student, Trinity College Dublin) 
Thalia is in the final year of studying a BA in Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. Thalia is conducting her final year project with the Cusack lab, and will be using fMRI data to investigate whether infants can distinguish stimuli at 2 months. Thalia is particularly interested in whether early experiences and exposure to objects affects infants’ ability to distinguish objects.​

Former Members

 Alumni
​Màiri Gardner (Trinity College Dublin)

Postdocs (Cognitive Neuroscience)
Annika Linke (Western University)
Bobby Stojanoski  (Western University)
Conor Wild (Western University)
Daniel Mitchell (University of Cambridge)
Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky (University of Cambridge)
Jason Taylor (CamCAN, Cambridge)

Postdocs (Neuroimaging methods)
Marta Correia (University of Cambridge)
Ciara Greene (University of Cambridge)
Stefan Hetzer (University of Cambridge)
Daniel Beauregard (University of Cambridge)

Postdocs (Clinical imaging)
Jeff Crukley (Western University)
Jingyun Chen (Western University, with Mark Daley)
Hester Duffy (Western University)
Charlotte Herzmann (Western University)
Leire Zubiaurre-Elorza (Western University)
​
Visiting Research Fellows
Hiromichi Hagihara (The University of Tokyo)

Programmer
Aya Myhr (Western University)

Research Assistants
Enna-Louise D'Arcy (FOUNDCOG Recruitment Coordinator and Research Assistant, Trinity College Dublin)
Oscar Markey (Trinity College Dublin)
Anna Birbeck (Trinity College Dublin)
Deborah Ness (Trinity College Dublin)
​Michelle Tran (Western University)

Graduate Students
Laura Cabral (PhD, Western University)
Patrick Gatutsi (MSc, Neuroscience, Western University)
​Jordynne Ropat (MSc Neuroscience, Western University)
Jacob Matthews (MSc Medical Biophysics, Western University)
Michelle Tran (MSc Neuroscience, Western University)
Annika Linke (PhD University of Cambridge)
Daniel Mitchell (PhD University of Cambridge)
Michele Veldsman (PhD University of Cambridge, with Daniel Mitchell)
Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky (PhD University of Cambridge)

Co-Supervised Graduate Students
Sarah Thompson (PhD University of Cambridge, with Bob Carlyon)
Karolina Moutsopoulou (PhD University of Cambridge, with Tom Manly)
Chris Dodds (PhD University of Cambridge, with Tom Manly)
Polly Peers (PhD University of Cambridge, with John Duncan)
Mark Stokes (PhD University of Cambridge, with John Duncan)
Michelle Tran (Western University, Canada)

Honours students
Rūta Sevrukaitė (Higher Diploma Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)
Adrienne Mesa Sheehan (Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin)
Maggie O Shea (Psychology Student, Trinity College Dublin)
Alex Graham (Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin)
Emma Hudson (Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)
Emily Markey (Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)
Lauren Travers (Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin)
Aoife Daly (Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)
Anna Birbeck (Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)
Madison Laurel Beaty (Neuroscience, Western University)
Laura Cabral (Psychology, Western University)
Vivek John (Physiology and Pharmacology, Western)
Ronak Patel (Neuroscience, Western University)
Kristen Turner (Western University, Canada)
Angela Westgate (Psychology, Western University)
​Mason Kadem (Psychology, Western University)
​Kristen Turner (Psychology, Western University)
Joanna Ryan (Psychology, Trinity College Dublin)

Lab Volunteers and Summer Interns
Anisha Wadhwa (Trinity College Dublin)
Camden Arnold (University of Notre Dame)
Maeve Kelly (Trinity College Dublin)
Oliver Shipston-Sharman (visiting Research Elective from Edinburgh University)
Gwenyth Gasper (University of Notre Dame)
Brenda Finlay (Trinity College Dublin)
Marcus Lo  (Western University)
Roni Shanoada (Western University)
Claire Chambers (visting from École Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Lauren Forrest (Schulich School of Medicine, Western University, Canada)
Marcus Lo (Western University, Canada)
Andrew Nicholson (Western University, Canada)
Kim Ramos (visiting from Seton Hall University, NJ)

Neuroscience at the Cusack lab
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