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

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.
Hiromichi Hagihara, PhD (Visiting research fellow)
​Hiromichi completed his Ph.D. from Kyoto University (Japan) and is currently a postdoc at IRCN Babylab led by Dr. Sho Tsuji at The University of Tokyo (Japan). His interest includes language development in infancy and toddlerhood, the development of automated assessments of children's behavior, and the enhancement of collaborations between developmental scientists and clinicians/educators. In Cusack Lab, his research is focused on exploring factors that affect the accuracy of automated gaze coding algorithms in order to provide better instructions to parents in the context of online experiments.
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, and how this understanding can in turn inspire methods to improve the performance of artificial neural networks. 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.
Rūta Sevrukaitė (Final Year Higher Diploma Psychology Student)
Rūta is a final year postgraduate Psychology Conversion Course student at Trinity College Dublin. Her B.A. in English with Drama, completed in University College Dublin fostered an appreciation for semantics and sensory perception. She is interested in how visual perception and the formation of semantic associations presents neurologically and behaviourally. In the Cusack Lab, she is working on her final year thesis. Her project focuses on establishing a functioning paradigm to explore intrinsic neural timescales facilitating visual perception.
Undergraduate Students
 ​Adrienne Mesa Sheehan (Final Year Neuroscience Student)
Adrienne is currently in her final year of a Neuroscience B.A. in Trinity College Dublin. Throughout her degree, she has cultivated an interest in cognitive neuroscience and visual processing, which has lead her to completing an exciting final year project at the Cusack Lab. Her project is using fMRI to investigate how objects are semantically associated, and the role that time plays within that.
Maggie O Shea (Final Year Psychology Student)
Lab Volunteers
Camden Arnold (Third Year Undergraduate, Neuroscience & Behaviour, University of Notre Dame, )
Camden is a third year undergraduate Neuroscience and Behaviour student at the University of Notre Dame. He is a visiting student at Trinity College Dublin and is volunteering in the Cusack Lab during his time here.

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)
​
Programmer
Aya Myhr (Western University)

Research Assistants
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
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
Aoibhe De Burca (Trinity College Dublin)
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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