The Cusack Lab

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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
The Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
School of Psychology
Principal Investigator at SFI INFANT Centre
Trinity College Dublin

Follow @rhodricusack

​Rhodri with son, Calin

The Team

Lab manager

Màiri Gardner
Màiri has a broad education in science, research and education from Edinburgh University, University College of Cork, and Oxford University, followed by a number of years of teaching experience of the International Baccalaureate at the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy. She has returned to Ireland and is currently working for two research groups in Trinity College Dublin: the FOUNDCOG Project at the Cusack Lab in the TCIN and the Thermodynamics and Energetics of Quantum Systems Group in the School of Physics.

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.

Follow @LorijnSZ

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.

Follow @anna_truzzi

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.

Follow @chiara_cee

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.

Hannah Craddock (PhD Candidate)
Hannah has started as a PhD student in the lab. She completed her Masters at UCD and her thesis involved an EEG study and modelling of perceptual decision making. Following that she worked in industry in data science for two years. She is interested in using machine learning and deep learning along with fmri analysis to answer interesting questions about the brain aswell as developing computational models of cognitive function. ​
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Oscar Markey (Research Assistant)
Oscar is a final year undergraduate student of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. He has an ongoing Final Year Project in the lab regarding the effectiveness of cartoons in holding infants' attention. He has a keen interest in the developing mind and hopes to increase his expertise in this subject in the future.

Undergraduate Students

Áine Dineen (Final Year Neuroscience Student)
​Áine is a final year Neuroscience student at Trinity College Dublin. Áine is interested in the reciprocal relationship between neuroscience and computer science. In the lab, she is exploring ways in which deep learning can be leveraged to test theories of infant brain development, with current focus in the field of visual development, and how this understanding can in turn inspire methods to improve the performance of artificial neural networks.

Emily Markey (Final Year Psychology Student)
Emily is interested in Developmental studies, particularly infant attention and cognition. The Goldilocks effect refers to this optimal area of human attention in which stimuli is neither too predictable, nor too complex (Kidd et al., 2012). Emily’s study will examine whether this effect exists across the speed of image presentation, while image complexity remains the same. Hopefully, this will determine the optimal speed for image sequence presentation which holds infant attention, thus informing infant fMRI studies.

Alex Graham (Final Year Neuroscience Student)
Alex's research project will use functional imaging data obtained during passive viewing of objects in two forms (photo vs quickdraw cartoon) to asses the neural organisation of high-level object representation in the ventral visual pathway. Using representational dissimilarity analysis and multidimensional scaling of the data set, this project will assess the major semantic divisions suggested within the literature and their propensity to drive distributed neural response patterns in high level object regions, with intent to advance our understanding of how knowledge is organised within the brain.

Emma Hudson (Final Year Psychology Student)
Emma is particularly interested in the areas of Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience and her final year project in our lab aims to investigate the effect image complexity has on infant curiosity and attention. Hopefully this project will give us a greater insight into the level of information that infants prefer to process at once, by looking at which stimuli capture their ‘peak’ level of curiosity.

Former Members

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)
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Programmer
Aya Myhr (Western University)

Research Assistants
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
Lauren Travers (Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin)
Aoifa 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
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)
Oliver Shipston-Sharman (visiting Research Elective from Edinburgh University)